Randall Stross writes a rousing sales pitch for CEOs to blog in today’s Times:
C.E.O. blogging should no longer be viewed as extreme sport. Mr. Schwartz’s example shows that blogging fits quite naturally into the chief executive’s work week. In an exhortatory piece, “If You Want to Lead, Blog,” published in The Harvard Business Review last year, Mr. Schwartz predicted that “having a blog is not going to be a matter of choice, any more than having e-mail is today.”
“My No. 1 job is to be a communicator,” Mr. Schwartz told me last week. “I don’t understand how a C.E.O. would not blog if committed to open communication.”
Assuming that other chief executives are willing to make their thoughts just as visible as Mr. Schwartz’s, the blog provides a highly efficient medium of publication. Mr. Schwartz, for instance, simultaneously reaches shareholders, software developers and current and prospective customers. With posted responses, these groups easily reach him as well as one another. . . .
“They should come down from the mountain and communicate in their own words — without handlers,” Ms. [Debbie] Weil [author of “The Corporate Blogging Book,” which Portfolio Hardcover is to publish this week] said. “For what they’re paid, is that too much to ask?”
Who are the CEOs you think would most benefit from blogging?
