"Celebrity" is a clumsy metaphor for this because most celebrities are made by behind-the-scenes executives and agents who have a lot of power. Celebrities are

"Celebrity" is a clumsy metaphor for this because most celebrities are made by behind-the-scenes executives and agents who have a lot of power. Celebrities are mostly made products. Establishing independent credibility is something else. It's not outsized fame, but it's still enough of a force that companies are beginning to see it as dangerous. Thirty years ago, companies held all the cards, because credibility came from job titles and references that only a hand-picked class of stewards called "managers" could hand out, then managed to convince the peasants that it was "unethical" to play out-of-band (by having a friend give a reference as manager, or upgrading a title). If they wanted to reduce a target's career credibility to zero, they could do so. They could fire that person and give a terrible reference and call the person "disgruntled" if he said anything bad about them. They could even reduce the employee's job title and fail to acknowledge that he held the higher one at any time: their word against his. The only recourse an employee had was to sue the employer, which is mutually assured destruction at best, because even winning a termination suit is usually bad for a person's career. Companies could also bring ruin upon people who spoke the truth about them, so almost no one did, and this kept their pristine organizational reputations (and thus, their credibility) intact. We're moving toward a different sort of economy in which these middlemen are losing their hold. The one-sided expectation of "professionalism" (companies can be abusive, but employees and exes are expected to keep their interests and secrets no matter what) is ending. It's a very good thing, but it's scary for corporations because they've lost control of information, and because it's not hard to make recruiting just enough harder to cost the company more than, say, a 6- to 12-month severance (which is extremely generous, at least in the U.S.) would cost.