Archive for the 'CEO Blogs' Category

The See-Through CEO

Published by Amitai Givertz on September 11, 2007 in Business Matters and CEO Blogs. 0 Comments

Wired posts The See-Through CEO that explores the advantage corporate top-dogs gain from understanding and managing transparency as a strategic tool. The article weighs the pros and cons of radical transparency — as questionable a term as “totally honest” as if to suggest there are degrees of integrity – and cites some examples worth thinking about.

In discussing the strategic potential of CEO transparency Clive Thompson makes this interesting point which should resonate with business bloggers who consider such lofty things to their own advantage:

Google is not a search engine. Google is a reputation-management system. And that’s one of the most powerful reasons so many CEOs have become more transparent: Online, your rep is quantifiable, findable, and totally unavoidable. In other words, radical transparency is a double-edged sword, but once you know the new rules, you can use it to control your image in ways you never could before.

Why don’t we ditch the tautology “radical transparency” and opt for something that more accurately reflects what really goes on in the C-suites of many corporations? How about “opacity” instead?

At least then we can honestly frame a discussion about about the degrees of filtering that are appropriate for those areas of business which properly belong out of the public domain. We can also begin to examine the dubious motivations for those who choose to adopt “openness” as a means of obscuring the truth, managing reputations that may not withstand the tests of real integrity.

CEO Blogger Unstuck, Stuck Again

Published by Amitai Givertz on February 20, 2007 in Business Matters and CEO Blogs. 2 Comments

Jason Goldberg, Jobster’s Blogging CEO Learns a Lesson

Richard Becker who authors the Copywrite, Ink blog posts a fantastic reply to comments left by “fire-brand” Jason Goldberg on his inaugural posting on RecruitingBloggers.com. For some, Jason Goldberg energized the debate on CEO blogging, albeit polarizing a great many within the fast-growing, lively and precocious Recruitosphere, and beyond.

As an aside, Jason Goldberg has been a favorite topic in many posts on my semi-retired Recruitomatic Blog. I couldn’t make up my mind then whether he is Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde, and I still can’t make up my mind now. Anyway…

A reading of Richard’s post will give anyone who is not familiar with the recent debacle surrounding layoffs at start-up Jobster – and Jason Goldberg’s opaque and inept handling of the situation in real time — will find this an excellent point of entry into what is for me, undoubtedly, one of the most interesting twists in the developing genre of CEO blogs.

There is an object lesson here for those who are prepared to learn from Jason Goldberg’s naivety and Richard’s PR prowess, not least of all, for Jason Goldberg himself.  Richard’s “living case study assessment” is proving to be a growing resource for understanding the related issues of CEO blogging, crisis communication and understanding that sometimes it is better to be thought a fool than to remove all doubt.

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The Dialectics of CEO Blogging

Published by Amitai Givertz on January 6, 2007 in CEO Blogs and Research. 0 Comments

Conventional wisdom has it that change in business – the type of groundbreaking organizational change that enables a company to compete and win on many levels – comes from the top down. Without change being led from the “top” it is challenging within traditional models to effect meaningful transformations that yield positive, measurable and sustainable results. That’s conventional wisdom.

On the other hand, it seems to me that blogging – the recasting of conventional wisdom online if you will – is a very “bottom-up” type of activity. At least I think so.

So, if this thesis and antithesis hold true, CEO blogging is an interesting synthesis of sorts, a context within which to understand a variety of emerging concepts that similarly contrast with a top-down approach to business, communications and control; things like servant leadership, transparency, customer evangelism, yada, yada, yada. 

Okay, a long-winded introduction as to why I find myself looking this morning for a definitive list of CEO blogs. I’m not sure what I was hoping to surface by way of lists and comparative analyses but I find myself writing this thinking there is much more to be done if I want to get what I want, whatever that is. As I reflect on what a monumental task it would be to create my own list and analysis I realize that a wiki – a bottom-up approach if ever there was one – would be a far better way of solving this problem…

Ta-dah! The NewPR Wiki: CEO Blog List.

Unrelated but topical, I found Debbie Weil’s BlogWrite for CEOs, a companion to her book The Corporate Blogging Book. My friend Shannon Seery who writes about social media in the recruiting bubble on EXCELER8ion.com lent me the hardback before Christmas. I hope to have read it before Easter. Shannon also turned me on to another wiki project in one of her recent posts about the Fortune 500 Blog Project. That should be interesting to look at too.

So there we are, there we have it. Or, do we? Consider this hypothesis: if a wiki is to a blog what top-down is to bottom-up, how long will it be before we see the emergence of corporate wikis, CEOs wiki’ing? And, what will CEOs be doing with them I wonder. Hmmm… Perhaps someone should write a book.

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