The CEO’s job

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A letter to Business Week in response to the magazine’s cover story on blogging asks, “Is this really what we want our corporate leaders spending hours a day doing?”

Yes. Definitely.

In thinking this through, it’s important to put a corporate leader’s blogging efforts in context. Step back from the new technology and all the attention the software gets and consider what blogging is:

Communication.

Ask most CEOs what their job is, and they’ll tell you that communication represents a massive part of their responsibilities. (I once heard a CEO say the letters stand for “customers, employees, and owners,” the primary audiences with whom a CEO must be engaged. I liked that.) Blogs represent a new channel for communication. Not the only channel, to be sure, but a new one that may be better, in some cases, than the older channels. Imagine a CEO who rejected the telephone as a means of talking with investors just because it was new and different!

Neville and I interviewed the chairman of Holland’s Tulip Computers, who echoed this sentiment. His job, he said, was to communicate, and blogs provide him with a channel to do that more easily and in more of a two-way environment.

So, given that CEOs strategize the use of blogs as a communication channel that enhances or improves communication, yes, you bet. That’s what I want my corporate leaders spending hours a day doing.