Blogging and the Role of the CEO

said so last year during reiterated his belief in a post to his Intuitive Systems blog. Dave makes a number of points to support his belief, but it all comes down to this:

The traditional role of a Chief Executive Officer is to raise money. That's it.

The problem with Dave's premise is that this simply is not true. About 20 years ago, I met a successful Fortune 500 CEO of a thriving company who was speaking at a conference. I've never forgotten what he told the audience. The initials CEO may stand for Chief Executive Officer, he said, but they also stand for "Customers, Employees, and Owners." These, he said, are a CEO's principal audiences. It is the CEO's job to communicate effectively with these audiences to support the big-picture goals of the company. This perspective is reinforced by any number of resources. Former GE CEO Jack Welch, for example, wrote this in Chapter 24 of his autobiography (the chapter is titled, "What This CEO Thing Is All About") as paraphrased in a posted to the Fastlane blog). But Dave's assertion that no CEO should ever blog is just wrong. Given the requirement that a CEO serve as the company's chief representative to key publics (customers, employees, owners), no CEO should ever dismiss out of hand any communication tool that may serve him and his company well. Tag: Yahoo! My Web | Furl Bookmark Murdok: Holtz Communication + Technology which focuses on helping organizations apply online communication capabilities to their strategic organizational communications. As a professional communicator, Shel also writes the blog

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