Senior Exec Bloggers - Scarce Resource

This month I'll be giving a short seminar on blogging tips for senior executives, something I have talked about before here and in other forums.

I used to include a few CEO blogs in my blogroll as best-in-breed models, but dropped them a year or so ago as I shifted focus to social media and digital pundits. 

For the client session, I started to refresh my list of good exemplar senior executive blogs. Save for the blog of my boss (no choice but to say that really), it's not looking good. I'm not finding very many, and two of those I've scavenged are holdovers from that old list - the inimitable Mark Cuban and the ever energetic Bill Marriott. The only other one I can find written with any real enthusiasm is that of Craigslist founder Craig Newmark.

Surely I'm missing some senior executive social web rock stars. Any suggestions?

Attack your Critics: Good Reputation Rebuilding Strategy?

(Photo credit . . . Wong/Getty; Ngan/Getty)

Public relations academics will be analyzing for years BP's handling of communications during the Deepwater Horizon leak.

While many thought Tony Hayward (". . . Everything we can see at the moment suggest that the overall environmental impact of this will be very, very modest.") was not stellar in the role of chief public spokesperson, the jury remains out about whether his successor Bob Dudley will manage BP's reputation rebuilding strategy any better.

He's not off to a textbook start: In a speech to the Confederation of British Industry, Dudley claimed:

A great rush to judgment by a fair number of observers before the full facts could possibly be known, even from some in our industry. I watched graphic projections of oil swirling around the gulf, around Florida, across and around Bermuda to England -- these appeared authoritative and inevitable. The public fear was everywhere.

So much for taking on the burden of responsiblity as the starting point for a reputation overhaul.

What I Learned From the NYT Today

What I realized today after reading a New York Times editorial on Goldman Sachs is that many more CEOs in the financial services sector than we care to think, when they're home at night in the dark, are convinced they did nothing wrong.

In fact, they have every intention of taking similar risks again.

Why? Because they presume a fundamental truth: the manipulation of financial products is a necessary - even essential - element in a dynamic economy.  Because they feel they were justified in receiving government bailouts precisely because their financial strategies make the economy hum. Because the personal rewards of successful risk taking are too great. Because boards of directors still believe in their guts the Milton Friedman dictum that "the busines of business is business" and what's good for shareholders (read 'institutions') is good for all of us.

And in our hearts, even after fulsome apologies, promises of reform, compliant acceptance of a few minimal restrictions on bonuses, we know they will not change.

That's why the apologies seem so hollow, why there is such editorializing about whether an apology is enough. It isn't. Because, I hazard to guess, it's likely a lie.

Blogs on Leadership

CEOs must have a tough time deciding what to read among all the blogs, online news sites, management school journals and mainstream media which offer points of view on how CEOs can lead better. Alright, they likely don't read any of them.

Should they change their minds, here is a recent addition to the plethora of leadership punditry that may be worth watching: The Syd Blog is by Sydney Finkelstein, the Steven Roth Professor of Management at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. The blog is subtitled "Insight into the force and follies of leaders."  His latest post looks at how Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis, who was stripped of his chairman title last week, may still lose his CEO position even though Bank Of America is run by what Finkelstein calls a "rubber-stamp board."

Sounds like Finkelstein would not be displeased.

Corporate Blogging: Still Hesitant After All These Years

More Fortune 500 companies are blogging, but the pace of growth is still shall we say restrained.

The full results of a study by Dr. Nora Ganim Barnes, Ph.D. and Eric Mattson, CEO of Financial Insite
Inc., a Seattle-based research firm are available here and a summary of the key findings are in a news release by the Society for New Communications Research.

Of the findings posted in yesterday's statement, here are few of particular interest:

• 81 of the Fortune 500 or 16% currently have public-facing blogs, compared with 39 percent of the Inc. 500, 41 percent of the higher education sector and 57 percent of the nation’s Top 200 Charities.


• 28 percent of the Fortune 500’s blogs link to Twitter accounts


• 90 percent of the Fortune 500’s blogs have the comments feature enabled