Your business card. It’s a simple thing, really. Not much more than a small scrap of paper, but consider how it defines you.

I remember the first cards I received when I started working at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside 37 years ago as the college’s sports information director. Having a real business card to pass out to friends and strangers less than a month after graduating from college. Wow. I had made it!

I remember asking my then-22-year-old non-business-card-holding friends, “Want my card?” Well, they got one whether they wanted one or not, as I removed it from the shiny (cheap) little fake-leather folder the printer supplied with them.

Now, in conducting this somewhat tongue-in-cheek analysis of business cards, we’re generalizing, and the first thing you can generally assume about generalizations is they are generally wrong. (Which makes the preceding statement right...or wrong.)

We can’t change much about our business cards unless we work for ourselves or own the company. Most working stiffs have to toe the company line and logo with their cards. There may be a bit of flexibility with your name while there’s virtually none with your title, especially the lower you are on the corporate food chain.

First, there’s your name itself, admittedly the most important item on the card. But how you present your name to others via this card is, let’s face it, how you want to be addressed.

If your card reads “James Arthur Young IV” one might assume that you are a rather formal person, perhaps even stuffy or full of himself.

Add in “Esq.” after your name and you seem to be an attorney. Add in “The Hon.” (for honorable) and you appear to be a judge or even a retired politician (!). Obviously, an M.D., D.V.M. or D.D.S. after the name denotes a doctor or dentist while “Dr.” before the name generally labels someone with a Ph.D.—likely an academic—who likes to be called “Doctor.”

But if that card reads “James Arthur (Jimmy) Young IV” then we have an entirely different view of you. Perhaps you’re the fun-loving but somewhat lazy scion of a wealthy family. Or just a good old boy who doesn’t take his pedigree all that seriously.

Of course, if you’re just “Jimmy Young” you’re a regular guy.

But really, I’ve discovered that for many people the name on their card is how they like to be addressed, although some feel compelled to be somewhat formal and go the first name/middle initial route.

So much for the name. Now, the title. Most of us have standard titles. Chairman. CEO. COO. CFO. CIO. CTO. President. Vice President. Director. Coordinator. Owner. Manager,/ Account Executive. Manufacturer’s Representative. Project Manager. Commercial Banking Officer.

In short, a job, a title that kind of fits.

Of course, the off-the-wall ones are the best. I will always remember one guy who owned a company whose card read “The Big Cheese.” Now that’s someone you just have to like, someone who doesn’t take it all that seriously.

Another favorite card is that of Johnny “The Transition Man” Campbell, who labels himself a business performance specialist and has a both-sides-printed card that tells you everything you could want to know about this loquacious former Indiana University trackman who received one of our entrepreneurial excellence awards last fall. The card is printed in red and white (and black) but he may really be using IU’s cream and crimson.

But the great ones, the ones you remember, are what make some business cards special, even keepers, long after you’ve lost contact with the people who handed them to you.

For example, I still have a batch of cards that I collected from people back in 1983-84 when I worked for the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee. As head of the Main Press Center for the 1984 Olympics, I met and interacted with editors and journalists from around the world.

I can say that business cards were—and I suspect, still are—a very important part of business life, especially in Japan, China and Korea. I still have cards from people in those countries who work for newspapers or wire services, many printed in English on one side and their native language on the other. I even have the cards of two then-members of the International Olympic Committee Press Commission, one who had been a Japanese soldier in World War II and the other a German who was a POW in the States, where he learned to speak English. To dine with those men, almost 40 years after the War, well...what an experience.

When first meeting many of these international visitors, I learned that the accepted—really, expected—routine was to first exchange cards and, when so doing, present it to the other person in a somewhat formal fashion, as in presenting a gift. Passing a batch around the table as so many of us do at chamber of commerce luncheons would not have cut it!

But the best card I ever got? Bar none, it was from Jesse Owens. It read “Jesse Owens, Cleveland, Ohio” with a phone number. Really, what else was needed for one of our nation’s most famous athletes?

So next time you get a card, think of what it says about that person. Think of what yours says about you, too.

I still have cards from every job I’ve held. It’s always good to remember how you started but, more importantly, to never forget that while a name and a title on a card may say who we are, how we conduct ourselves in life and business regardless of title is the truer indication of what we are.