Blogging CEO's - Soft CEOs

(This is a copy of a post I made to my Sun blog account http://blogs.sun.com/harpreet
Blogging CEO's - Soft CEOs.


The recent issue of McKinsey Quarterly talks about "Soft" Leadership in business. It makes a case about the need for CEO's to blog as a mean to exercise soft power. Soft power is the currency to mandate social change and nourish business.


Soft power is usually used in the geopolitical context. Joseph Nye (Dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government) says "Soft power is the ability to get what you want by attracting and persuading others to adopt your goals. It differs from hard power, the ability to use the carrots and sticks of economic and military might to make others follow your will. Both hard and soft power are important in the war on terrorism, but attraction is much cheaper than coercion, and an asset that needs to be nourished."


McKinsey says that we could extend this soft power definition and apply it to the business world. In the business world, it usually means addressing controversial issues, attracting people to shared objectives or a vision and nurturing relationships.


Since Jonathan is the only CEO who blogs : I decided to look at Jonathan's blogs, from the view point of soft power and see how his blogs stack up on "soft power" skills mentioned in the quarterly. (He comes up with flying colors).



Addressing social and controversial issues

Businesses now hold a bigger say in social changes, than ever before. CEO's need to address controversial issues and not shy away from them. Usually when social issues coincide with strategic issues ; CEO's become reticent. But these controversial issues are the ones that usually let people understand where you stand and build your credibility

Jonathan has not been shy about talking about issues that have social impact and have coincided with Sun strategy: addressing digital divides (a consistent Sun theme), addressing power issues (electrical power and not soft power) ; mostly in context of datacenters, addressing the need to view IT as an electrical utility. We can see that the blogs have brought forth discussions on these myriad of topics : some of them controversial, some visionary.


Rating: Good



Dealing with Stakeholders - fostering and nurturing relationships


CEO's have to deal with stakeholders. Soft power requires diplomacy, requires fostering and nurturing relations with stakeholders.

If we look at the comments in the blogs, we notice that there are consumers who complain about problems with Sun (usually with getting new machines or so) ; but if we look couple of comments down, there is usually a Sun rep who will respond and fix the problem rightaway. Sort of super-ultra-fast service by the virtue of the blog being open (and a Sun reps worry that maybe Jonathan reads the comments too blogs.sun.com/images/smileys/wink.gif" class="smiley" alt=";-)" title=";-)" /> ). This provides an environment to nurture relations with the consumers.

Jonathan often makes comments about strategy, projects and products - this is way better than the usual conference call that CEO's give their shareholders.


Rating: Good



Attracting others to shared objectives and vision
OpenSolaris! Glassfish!!


Rating : Excellent


Credibility


Soft power is difficult to control and exert. It will not work if tools like blogging are used for propaganda or you are perceived as a spin-master. It requires credibility. Jonathan has been blogging for about 2(?) years now. He has built his credibility (as a blogger) before becoming the CEO. The fact that Forbes writes about his blogging and asks for other CEO's to do the same reflects positively on his credibility as a blogger.


Rating : Excellent


It's been less than 6 months after Jonathan has become the CEO. The jury is out whether people will vote with their wallets (it appears that they are). It is clear that Jonathan has a deep understanding of the soft power he exudes via his blogs and knows how to use this well. Let's hope that CEO's in competing companies do not!!

Ayahuasca

Wow!!
Interdimensional journeys, fighting your Gremlins! Where do I sign up?

Guilty goes free - yet again.

It makes my blood boil reading news like these. Especially 4 days after I marked my sister's 10th death anniversary - a drunk driver killed her.

Sanjeev Nanda (21 years) grandson of Admiral SL Nanda (now an arms dealer), killed 7 people including 2 cops when driving drunk in New Delhi, India. Our fellow was on vacation from a management school in Philadelphia and was test driving his new BMW totally drunk. Apparently not drunk enough, because he had the wits to try to destroy material evidence (he hosed down the car to remove the blood marks).

Well Sanjeev has just walked free today (Feb 25th, 2006).

Varsha Bhosale from rediff has captured what I wanted to write in an much earlier article. Hers was written in 1999 much before the court result. I guess she knew that this would happen. Varsha asked a question whether Sanjeev would have driven drunk in the USA. We all know the answer to that - he would not have.

Rot in hell Sanjeev!

Feb 10th 2006 - 10 years

February 10th 1996 9:30 PM IST, a group of friends get into a car to celebrate a win at an inter-collegiate competition and head out to Lonavala (a hill station) from Pune(near Bombay) in India.

By 2:30 am, four of them have died in a car accident, over-run by a drunk truck driver. One (my sister) dies 10 days later.

The Bombay-Pune road has been notorious. It is called National Highway 4 (NH4). From 1996-2000, the Indian Government estimated that an average of over 4100 accidents per year happened on this 170km stretch of the highway, of which 3300 were headon. My sister's accident was one of these. The highway has some switchbacks, 2 lanes turning to 1 and 1 lane turning to two. This is hard to negotiate during the daylight hours. It is deadly when a drunk driver is negotiating it in the night.

The police officer dealing with this case told us that he got tired of complaining to the road officials that this crazy mess of switchbacks should be done away with. He dealt with almost 1-3 accidents a week.

The problem is compounded as this highway is used to transport vegetables to the Bombay markets. The vegetables have to reach Bombay by 5 am or so in the morning. The owners give the truck drivers a bottle of hooch and tell them to make the journey in 3 1/2 hours. The normal time was about 4 1/2 hours from Pune to Bombay.

So there we have it, 5 kids killed due to some vegetables and stupid switchbacks.

The accident made it to newspapers for a couple of days.

I tried looking up for the articles on the web yesterday - nothing. Life moves on, just another accident on another highway and another set of people who are dead. Let's all move on.

Though, life does not move on for the family. It is in a strange sort of way - paused. It is like one person in the family stopped growing, forever paused in memory, forever young.

The brain works around all painful memories. For me, it has reworked itself such that I have a hard time filling in the details that I knew, even the names are very hard to come by. I have to struggle to get their names, I can get the faces but not the their names. Suddenly they pop up out of the blue, just like that. It is surreal.

So 10 years after their deaths, remembering :

• Pratik Dalal,
• Chandrasekhar,
• Ashish and
• Amrita Khatri.

And posting Amrita's picture.

Wondering what they would be doing today, if they were not snatched away at the ages of 18.

Sending warm thoughts their way and to their families.

Obituary of the Marathon Gremlin

With a heavy heart we would like to announce the demise of Harry's Marathon Gremlin. It took its last breath at 2:40 PM October 9th, 2005 in Chicago. The death was rather sudden, it was alive and kicking till about 2:39 PM. Post mortem shows that it died of a heart attack due to being kicked violently in its gut. It seemed it had a premonition of its death especially in the last few hours. Though, we must say, it did live its life to the fullest in the last couple of days.

About 3 weeks before it died, it made a new friend. The friend was called "Tendonitis". Tendonitis lived between inner side of Harry's left foot and ankle and it gained tremendous strength due to the fact that Harry seemed to have changed shoes to get rid of Gremlin's best friend the ITB. Harry seemed to have no idea of how to deal with Tendonitis. Knowing this, made the gremlin much stronger. Harry had to take 3 weeks off his training. Two doctors independently gave the Gremlin a shot in the arm when the told him to try running - if Tendonitis "pops", they will fix it by surgery.

Harry, thus arrived as an underdog in Chicago. He seemed intent on garnering sympathy support and encouragement by repeatedly showing a hideous ankle brace to people. Harry's family, coaches and mentor did seem to have worried looks on their faces. If we were betting people, we would never have bet on the Gremlin's demise. Ah...but the vagaries of nature.

The day of the marathon arrived. Cold, but not too cold. Asha tent was a boon for Harry - if we had paid careful attention, we may have detected that the Gremlin was showing slight discomfort... but alas we did not do so.
Coach Rajeev Patel (aka the talker) gave a last minute pep talk. We know Harry did not remember anything of the talk except he knew that it was supposed to be motivating and he got motivated. His motivation took an upward swing when he reached the start area and he saw the sea of people (44 thousand people!!) - he seemed to forget that he lost track of his mentor, who he was depending to run with. We were quite worried for the Gremlin and alerted Tendonitis about this.

Harry shot off from the start area and was going strong, he detected his mentor and started tracking her. But Tendonitis came to the rescue at mile 1.5 ~ 2. The plan seemed to be that Tendonitis would come in and the Gremlin would take over. Though Harry seemed to be made of tougher mettle, he kept going ... mile 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. He was doing his best times ever!! He missed seeing his family at mile 7.5 who seemed to be travelling in Chicago trains to get to various mile markers along the way. Even missing his family did not stop him. The Gremlin was clearly distressed and he sent an SOS to Tendonitis. And boy did Tendonitis come in like a knight in shining armour. Boom by mile 10, Harry was clearly distressed, everyone seemed to be overtaking him and the Gremlin fought back.

Mile 13 was clearly difficult, till Harry got a phone call from his family saying that they are at mile 17 with one of his best friends (Sudeepto who came in from Detroit). He picked up, though Tendonitis just totally stopped him on mile 16 - he could not walk, he got the ankle brace out and now he could not stand. Brace back on, he made it to mile 17. Aaahhhh family and that meant muffin. This is where we believe the Gremlin was in clear danger and we were worried for its survival. (We would have spent more time with it, if we knew this was the last time we would see it).

The Tendonitis kept fighting on. He knew that if it had to save the Marathon Gremlin, he was the Gremlins big hope. Mile 17, 18, 19 were good for Tendonitis, but the cell phone brought in the Gremlin's death knell. Harry's family called him up and showed up at mile 21. His wife walked with Harry as Harry attempted to run. Gremlin and Tendonitis could not call up on their other friends (typically nauseau and dizziness) as Harry's wife gave him stuff to eat on the run.
The Gremlin knew its end was near when Harry saw his parents and friend at mile 24. All of them walked with him. Knowing that his wife and mom were walking behind him, Harry took off with renewed vigor. Though Tendonitis gave a new meaning to taking off - there were people over taking him with brisk walking.

Finally @ 2:40, 6 hours and 40 minutes after the start, Harry finished the marathon. Gremlin breathed its last, completely broken and shattered. A good thing was it did not live to see the medal around Harry's neck.



Harry's behaviour has been shocking ever since. He was at the Asha party that night and did not even spend a few days in mourning. All we can say that our friend the Marathon Gremlin is in a much better place.



Where does Harry go from here? We do not know, he has been toying with doing a couple more marathons, now that the Marathon Gremlin is dead, he should not have a problem with that. He is even toying with idea of triathlons. What worries us that he no longer seems to be worried of Gremlins. Seems like we Gremlins now have our own Gremlin.

- Report prepared in memory of the Marathon Gremlin by the Association of Gremlins

PS: Harry would like to thank the following people: Ramya - the teacher, Rajeev Patel - the talker, Rajeev Char - the Iron Man, Tony Fong - the Mr. Lee, Deepak, Arun, Mala, Swati, Aruna the Captain, Anil Rao, Anu, Pavan, Ram Babu for their constant words of encouragement week after week, run after run. Harry would also like to thank everyone who showed up in the Chicago Marathon namely Shekhar, Charu, Lily, Selvi, Kalyan, Uma, Sreeni, Dhananjay and lots other who we are missing naming here due to short memory :-). Harry would also like to thank people who show up run after run waving and shouting words of encouragement, people like Niyati, Neeraj, Nandini, Deepa, Purnima Jandi and lots other again missed out due to short memory. Harry would like to thank Sudeepto, Sebonti who came in from Detroit to cheer him. Harry really loved it when his parents flew around the world from Kuala Lumpur to cheer him and support him!! Harry wants to thank Liza and Amit for being one of the first few people to believe in him :-). Harry would love to thank his wife - Natasha without whose support along the way through the run and through out the training program, this would not be certainly possible.
Harry also wants to put in the last signing off words "Asha Rocks"

Welcome 

Marathon Training - Fisticuffs with my Gremlin

Ever since I have started training for my marathon, people have asked me to write about my training experience. A multitude of reasons have held me back. Time is at a premium and I rarely get time to do anything else apart from running. The second reason is my "Gremlin". If you have'nt heard of a Gremlin before, everybody has one and I introduce you to mine today.

When I started my training - I hated running. Yes, I have said it - I hated running. One of the reasons I am running the marathon is to honour the memory of my sister. The other is that I itched to fight my Gremlin. I expected my training to be nothing short of a massive struggle. I hated running, my knees hurt when I walked for more than a mile. I could not get up in the morning. There were more than a couple of reasons not to do it.
I viewed myself as a gladiator with a small knife being circled by a huge beast with no chance of survival. Actually that sounds too grand. I viewed myself as someone being fed to the lions in the Roman arena. I knew that I had it in me to fight the marathon beast for some distance but would eventually would be devoured. My estimate was that I could not go over 10 kms.

Couple of years ago, I read a book called "Taming your Gremlin" by Rick Carson. It talked about a nasty creature that sits on our shoulder, whispering to us in a sinister voice that we are going to fail, that we can never succeed, that we are weak. Gremlins are funny creatures, they come up when you least expect them. They may come in negative thoughts or they may decide that they need to be stronger than just thoughts and come to you as injuries, flu or just tiredness. They are very adaptable creatures - you know!

I have found that my gremlin has become all powerful, dictating everything that I do. Its got a life of its own, it seems like it is a 100 ton monster, beating me down. It is, I decided, time that I put up a fight .

Training for a marathon gives plenty of oppurtunity for your gremlin to show up: "Why are you running?", "Your feet hurt!", "Why getup at 6am on a weekend, when you never got up for anything else?", "Why are you running even though you are not feeling well", "You are not feeling well", "Here, you loser, take a stomach virus". These thoughts almost come up everyday.
The pain is there most times. There are days that I think that quitting is the smartest thing to do.

Thats what makes training fun, it is as much mental as it is physical. There are punches and then there are counter punches. The boxing match continues. Lately I have been landing some, last week I ran my first half marathon in San Francisco and this week I ran a 15 miler. It is not that the fight is over, but it does seem to be getting intense as my weekly runs are becoming longer. Training has become a journey within self and without. I have learnt that I have oodles more determination than I gave myself credit for. I have learnt that though my body may complain, it still will get up and do what I ask it to. I have learnt that though I can fight, it still is great to have support of family and friends. I have learnt that there is my ego that I need to be aware of and ignore. This fight is living upto what it had promised me. It is a great journey to know myself, physically, mentally and spiritually.

After the 13 miles run, the marathon beast has been reduced to half. David feels taller in front of Goliath :-) . The momentum of the fight seems to be shifting towards my favour. With momentum shifting, I feel, it is time to look inside and introspect. It is time to restart writing my blog. Time to document words of encouragement to self to keep going through the final weeks of training.

I recently read a comment that is attributed to Lance Armstrong: " It may pain for a day, a week, a month or a year. But if I quit it lasts forever. "

There may be a day, that I will quit. But today is not one of them.

Hoping to post many more...