CEO Bloggers' Club

Climbing Everest

The old way :
- Build a big team (Minimum one hundred people)
- Bring a ton of food and material
- Wait for months before reaching the summit
- Don't take risks

The new way :
- Small team with commando spirit (10 people is enough)
- The lighter the better
- Speed is the key factor
- Use latest technlogies

If the world is your playground, take a look at skype and
how they became a world wide company in less than a
year.

There is extreme programming.
Some people are talking about extreme democracy.
Let's start talking about extreme management ?

Research Brief Weblogs in Marketing and PR -- Concept, opportunities and challenges

Today a German study regarding chances and opportunities for Corporate Blogs was published by Berlcon Resarch and caused kind of various feedbackin the blogsphere here.
It seems Berlcon did some slightly optimistic counts for the actual amount of german blogs being published at these days (they counted 60.000 to 75.000), but the main focus is still correct. The usage of corporate blogging will increase, the advantages for companies and readers is more than obvious.
Did you come across studies like that in other countries or regions?

Subscribtion to the first meeting

To subscribe to the first meeting on the 14th. October in Paris, please go there.

Restoring hope to the customers

In response to the last two articles (“Obliquity” and “Restoring leadership”): For me, obliquity means not making profit your main goal. We must restore leadership because real leadership is lacking.

To take this idea a step further, there are two schools of thought concerning blogging. Blogging is an evolution or a revolution.

For me, blogging is a revolution. It’s a new paradigm. It’s not just a new marketing tool; it’s a new way of marketing products. Let the customers (and the people) choose for themselves.

People want to trust. The war in Iraq, Enron, Italian election … people are shocked and want something different. For the economy (and perhaps politics, etc. as well), I’m totally convinced that blogging is the solution. With the blog, you open access to backstage. People want to know what’s going on behind the scenes, what they’re buying, and how it’s made. Their need to know is so strong that we CEOs have no choice but to be entirely open.

Customer confidence is everything. The companies that will be able to restore hope and dreams will be the new leaders.

Okay, friends, ready for action?

Restoring leadership to the leaders

Robert Paterson has a link to a review of a book called Hope is Not a Method written by Gordon Sullivan and Michael Harper. It is considered to be one of the most important books in military and business management.

The book is an illuminating account of what it actually takes to build a learning organization in practice. Contrary to most conventional thinking, which says results come from good plans of planners executed by trained and compliant managers, it suggests that a learning organization is one designed to be successful in spite of plans which are imperfect, even though they are the best possible in an atmosphere of rapidly changing missions and resources. Good plans in a changing environment are those evolved during their accomplishment by those mandated to fulfill them, who must be willing to examine and learn from what worked and didn't work at each stage of the way.

2 + 2 = 8 (or 1)?... : The challenging world of "blog-iquity"

What is the magic, if any, behind 2 + 2 = 8? Well, the story is that if you try make it happen it usually won't work. To put it in John Kay's words "goals are most likely to be achieved when pursued indirectly." Obliquity is the name for this. What does it tell us about businesses and the goals they shoud be pursuing?

The current fad is for businesses to concentrate on maximizing shareholders value. Metrics have been crafted that supposedly measure the failure of success in achieving this target. They are called EVA, CFROI etc... The theory behind it is that, other things being equal, focussing exclusively on shareholders captures every dimension of the corporation anyhow. But is it that simple?

Is it carved in stone that a rational managerial framework is a sure winner? Or, should we call for a more holistic managerial (adaptative) approach (which blogs are made of)?

What to do if your company keeps getting shafted by media

I have been talking to a Big Media journalist about blogs over the last few days, and some interesting viewpoints have emerged from the conversation. We started out talking about how blogs and journalism differ from and complement one another, and ended up talking about why that is relevant to corporations and other organisations.

In journalism, you have a large number of generalists trying to produce authoritative, extremely reliable content about subjects that may be incredibly complicated. Some of them can manage it; many of them cannot. If our interests are in an educated public as a result of journalists producing the most informative and accurate reporting possible, then the tendency of many journalists to misinform - despite what may be the purest of intentions - cannot be ignored as simply "how journalism is".

Introducing 5 new members

Jeff Hoang
The founder of ReferNet has extensive enterprise software application development experience. He has held senior technical positions at Hewlett Packard, SGI, and several high-profile start-ups. He was a key employee at a start-up in 1998 that subsequently had a successful IPO in 1999. This company raised over $500 million and had a market cap well over $10 billion. The founder has a bachelor degree in applied science and engineering from Arizona State University.

Get a brand name using your blog

Greg Reinacker, CEO of NewsGator is having a contest on his blog to rename his company and his product, a popular RSS newsreader called NewsGator. He is offering a worthy prize.

So...I'd like to solicit some ideas from you. And what's in it for you? If we choose a name that you submitted to us first, we'll send you a brand-new Windows Media Center computer, and a free 12-month "Plus" subscription to NewsGator Online Services including NewsGator Media Center edition. All told, somewhere around a $1500 prize. I'd post a specific link to a machine, but if we can, we'll wait for the Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 launch, so you get the latest and greatest.

As Steve Rubel puts it Who needs a focus group when you have a blog?

What it takes to be a good CEO blogger

I had an interesting exchange yesterday about CEO bloggers. Someone said to me that the idea of a blogging CEO, like the idea of a blogging politician, was ludicrous. He told me his opinion that CEOs, like politicians, could never be expected to say anything genuine or unscripted by the PR department. My reply to him went something like this:

First of all, the PR department must take its hands off the blog in order for it to work properly - no fake blog entries written for the CEO, and no vetting posts before they go live. (If your CEO cannot be trusted, even after being trained in how to blog legally and sensibly, not to drop clangers in the posts he writes, then he should not be blogging.)

In order to blog well, they also have to be the right CEOs - straight-shooters, engaging and with interesting things to say. Sun Microsystems' Jonathan Schwartz is a great one, as are Thomas Nelson Publishers' Michael Hyatt and Five Across CEO Glenn Reid.

I am happy to tell a CEO or any other business exec: You should not blog, and even if you begged me to help you do it, I would not. Bad bloggers can influence how the world perceives the blogosphere, and I and my colleagues have got very certain ideas about the right way to blog. Blogging is about using an authentic, credible voice. And let's face it: not every CEO is credible, and not every CEO knows how to communicate authentically or can even be trained to do so. In some cases, that authentic voice isn't something that the company necessarily wants the public to hear. Such companies should not have a blogging CEO.

The politician who blogs is a fad here in the UK, but it will only last until the first career suicide by blog - in no time flat, the spin doctors will have their hands all over the blogs, rendering them pointless at best, laughable and damaging at worst. Politicians are all coming from the same gutter, and it is not often that you hear someone praising something the government has done. But there actually are many companies out there that are fantastic organisations, doing interesting and worthwhile things in their industries, with satisfied customers who evangelise their products, services and brands freely and happily. Those are the kinds of places many people would love to work. And those are the companies whose CEOs and other employees make the best bloggers and impeccable representatives of their respective companies.