Business and Blogging

A Plea From a CEO Who Happens to Blog

by Des Walsh on July 18th, 2007

One of my favorite blogs is that of Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz. But the author clearly doesn’t want to be known as a “CEO blogger”.

His post “The Internet vs. Stone Tablets” was prompted by an enquiry from the media. A reporter asked him, as a “CEO who writes a blog”, to comment on a story about another chief executive who had admitted to posting comments under an assumed name in a stock market chat room (presumably this story).

Jonathan takes aim at the practice of identifying people like him as “CEOs who blog”, observing that we don’t talk about, for instance CEOs who have cell phones as “cell-phoners”. He goes on to comment on the importance, for leadership, of effective communication and what that means for the use of technology.

Leading two or 200,000, you can’t do it without communicating. Using technology just leaves more time for everything else (I’m not saying stone tablets can’t be effective, they just take way longer to distribute).

So blogging is faster, more effective than stone tablets? OK, got that.

But I think the point he really wants to make is that he would like to see the world stop seeing blogging by a CEO as a novelty. I think he’s going to have to wait a while for that. Especially when those of us who make it part of our mission to promote corporate blogging like to point to some examples. And as Jonathan’s blog is smart and articulate, we are surely going to be pointing to him and his blog for some time.

Why not get more of your peers to blog, Jonathan, and then the reporters will have more people to call for comments?

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POSTED IN: Corporate, Enterprise 2.0, General, Policy, Web 2.0