Of all the CEOs I know, not personally of course, there's only one with a pony tail. That's Sun Microsystem's CEO for you, Jonathan Schwartz. He happens to be the only CEO who blogs, as far as I know. I found the link from Wikinomics, a book which I finished reading months ago.
Interestingly and coincidentally, his latest entry is on how the issues surrounding the print media and software companies.
I find it pretty remarkable for someone of such a high status in the corporate ladder be doing something like blogging. Isn't blogging for the hip and trendy younger folks? And you're a businessman, you'll immediately ask the value of blogging, from a CEO's perspective.
Blogging is actually just another medium to communicate to readers. When you're a CEO, you can categorise your readers into different segments. Very noticeably, the two main segments will be your own employees and the public.
Schwartz obviously is using his blog to be more accessible more personal to his employees. Sun is a large company with close to 35,000 employees. There's no way that people will know how the CEO is like or what he's thinking or more importantly, understand the actions he takes.
That's where the blog come in. Employees who read the blog will be able to identify his ideology. They will know at least which direction the company is heading towards and the plans he has for the company in the future. When you're down in the trenches, you will want your employees to know where to go.
The other advantage is you get to find out how your readers feel. You can also gain insights to ideas replied as comments by readers. Granted that you won't know who the readers are since they are anonymous, but at least you can see generally which camps the readers are coming from.
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