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13.11.05

Leading and/or blogging?

Jonathan Schwartz COO of Sun Microsystems writes in an essay in the Harvard Business Review (November 2005):

’Blogging lets you participate in communities you want to cultivate-whether it’s your employees, potential employees, customers, or anyone else-and leverage your corporate culture competitively. … Sun, like every organization, receives e-mails from happy customers lauding one employee or another for good work. … Immediately, people raised the concern that by identifying our best employees, we’d make them recruitment targets. Well, of course that could happen. But it cuts both ways. The upside is the positive ripple effect on workers’ morale and on the public’s perception of the company. What’s more, my competitors’ employees could see what I’m saying about my team and could decide whether I’m more compelling than their own leaders. So rather than being a threat to Sun, blogging about my best employees can build loyalty and be a recruitment tool to boot.’

I assume, Berry Johnson would call this polarity management: putting your best employees on the net is neither good or bad (it is not a solution). It all depends on the specific environment you are in and on the way you do it (clear guidelines, write it yourself, authenticity etc).

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