I was in a business meeting a few days ago, listening to a senior executive present his company’s strategic plan for 2007. One of his goals is to establish a new and interesting division of the company as a “thought leader” in its market segment.

Even though it’s a somewhat fuzzy phrase, most of us would understand a “thought leader” to be a company whose ideas, opinions, analyses, and other expressions of “thought” are considered by its peers as being the most authoritative, credible, and pioneering in its industry. Intrigued by the identification of this goal, I asked the executive if he was planning any blogs or wikis to help create the overall image of a “thought leader.” He was a little puzzled at first, wondering if I meant that he should be blogging, or that his marketing department should create an official corporate blog.

“No, no, no,” I responded. “What I meant was: are you encouraging your employees to create lots of individual blogs, so they can be recognized in your industry as the people who, as individuals, are ‘thought leaders’?”

There was a moment’s hesitation, after which the executive said, “Oh. Well. Ummm … that’s an interesting idea. I guess we should think about that … but, you know — if we did something like that, we’d have to be very, very careful to make sure our employees didn’t … well, umm … you know … I mean, sometimes you have a bad apple who starts ranting and raving on his blog…”

I wasn’t surprised: it’s not the first time I’ve heard such a reaction, and it’s usually articulated in more-or-less the same terms. I heard it from a dozen or more participants in one of the workshop sessions at the Web 2.0 “summit conference” in San Francisco a few weeks ago; I heard it from a couple dozen IT and business managers at a Web 2.0 conference I conducted in Rome last month; and I’ve heard it from various managers in other gatherings around North America and Europe. These are all intelligent, hard-working, well-meaning individuals; they’re not Luddites, and they’re not stupid. But their reaction clearly indicates a common theme and consensus in today’s business world: corporate blogging is dangerous.

Well, look, managers are managers; in the corporate environment, they are, to use George Bush’s clever phrase, “the deciders” of various aspects of corporate policy. And nobody ever said corporations were supposed to function like a democracy. On the other hand, nobody ever said that indentured servitude was the only allowable form of existence once we finished schooling as young adults. And to the extent that adults of all ages can vote with their feet, and walk out of one employer’s authoritarian environment in search of something less repressive, the typical corporate attitude toward blogging may cause more harm than many managers realize.

Managers and executives are paid to increase shareholder value, guard the company’s assets, generate more revenue and profits, and various other noble objectives; but if they have no employees, it’s likely to be somewhat more difficult to achieve such goals. Thus, it might be useful for managers to realize how their corporate blogging policy is likely to be interpreted by employees — especially younger employees, who still have a spark of independence and creativity, and who are not yet trapped by large mortgages, (illusory) dreams of pensions, and the fear of losing their company-paid insurance. From the employee’s perspective, management’s attitude toward corporate blogging (i.e., blogs written by employees and intended to be read by outsiders, as opposed to what Stowe Boyd and others have called “dark blogs,” for internal consumption only, behind the corporate firewall) sounds like this:

1. “We’re nervous, scared, and paranoid about the potential impact and consequences of a blog.” The concerns go on: “Bad things could happen if we allow blogging; bad things probably will happen if our employees start blogging. Our customers could be turned against us; we could be sued; we could be scorned and humiliated.”
2. “We have secrets, and we dare not let them be exposed.” Well, I can understand such a reaction from the CIA; but let’s face it, most companies do have “secrets” in the form of marketing plans, product development schedules, R&D work, and various forms of intellectual property. Obviously, they derive some competitive benefit from this information, and they don’t want it broadcast all over the Internet. But the notion that all of this would be disclosed in an inappropriate way, with the introduction of blogs, actually points to a deeper concern, which I’ll discuss below.
3. “We hide our mistakes, and we don’t want someone exposing those embarrassing mistakes in their blog.” This doesn’t get articulated very often, because it’s tantamount to admitting that company policy is to deny, obfuscate, and mislead its customers and various other segments of the public. We all know that politicians never admit their mistakes, but it’s discouraging to discover that companies often behave the same way. Worse: when management refuses to allow its employees to blog, and when it justifies the decision with this kind of rationale, it forces the employee to accept complicity in the policy: “You, too, are required to deny, obfuscate, mislead, and cover up any mistakes that you make, or that you see anyone else making.” And, as noted above, this is actually indicative of a deeper concern, discussed immediately below.
4. “We don’t trust our employees.” Aha! This is what management is really saying, in many cases: “Our employees are so stupid that they’ll blurt out all of our confidential information if we allow them to blog. And they’re so disloyal that they’ll expose every mistake we’ve made, no matter how minor and innocent such mistakes may have been. We don’t trust them!” Aside from the fact that it’s somewhat demoralizing to think that you’re working for someone who basically doesn’t trust you, what strikes me as odd is the fact that stupid/disloyal employees have long had alternative means of communicating inappropriate things to the media or the public — email, telephone, and even old-fashioned letters. But in the context of today’s environment, it’s perhaps more important to emphasize that employees can create their own blogs at home; and if they’re reasonably careful, they can create anonymous blogs and spew forth whatever venomous criticism they want. And far more important is the fact that customers can blog, wherever and whenever they want. Here’s an interesting experiment: go to your favorite search engine, type in the name of your corporate employer, followed by the word “sucks.” For a bit of recursive amusement, I just went to Google, and typed in “Google sucks.” Voila: 3,810,000 hits, in a mere 0.22 seconds!
5. “Blogging is different from any previous form of communication, and we refuse to acknowledge that our employees may have communicated stupid/disloyal thoughts in the past with e-mail, telephone calls, and snail-mail.” I really don’t understand why managers believe that blogs create some new kind of infinite power that didn’t already exist … but they do.
6. “Well, actually, now that we’ve thought about it, we don’t want our employees to use Web-based email services like AOL mail, G-Mail, HotMail, or instant-messaging.” Well, it’s great to have the company’s email servers behind the firewall … but an attitude like this reminds me of the old, pre-Internet days, when every company had its own “closed” email network, with almost insurmountable obstacles preventing email messages being sent between companies. Heck, why not just lock everyone into the corporate dungeon and throw away the key?
7. “If we let our employees blog, they’ll spend all their time whining and complaining. So if we do allow it, we’ll only allow blog postings that are approved in advance by the employee’s immediate manager, the HR department, the legal department, and the Chief Security Officer.” Such an attitude is, of course, guaranteed to inspire cheers of joy from the employees.
8. “The reason we require advance approval by all of these people is that we managers don’t really run our companies — our companies are actually controlled by our lawyers, our regulators, and the security experts.” Well, okay, I’m exaggerating a little … but not much. This is essentially what I’ve heard, over and over again, from managers in the financial services industry and various other regulated industries. I’m not denying that such regulatory control exists, and I understand that in many cases, it’s a matter of law — so IT managers and business managers quite understandably say that they have no choice in the matter. But why would any competent, ambitious, independent-minded young adult want to work in such an environment? One answer: sometimes such jobs pay obscenely large salaries and bonuses. Another answer: in a recession, even a mind-numbing job in an authoritarian company is better than no job at all. But the job market for many of today’s young knowledge workers is pretty good these days; and the salaries in many of these authoritarian companies is not that much higher than that of other companies … and at least for the time being, people can vote with their feet.
9. “We don’t want our employees talking directly to customers — that’s why we have a Marketing Department, a Corporate Communications Department, and a Public Relations Department.” The corporate consequences of such a policy were described eloquently a few years ago in a book that’s still highly relevant today: The Cluetrain Manifesto. But I’m more interested here in the perspective of the bottom-level peon employee: “What’s that? You don’t want me talking to any of our customers, our prospects, the people who actually use our products and services? Why not? Do you really think I’m such an inferior human being that I’m not worthy of such interactions?”
10. “Besides, this is all silly: corporate blogs would just be a bunch of frivolous, narcissistic chatter — like the teenage postings on MySpace.” Employee’s translation: “Even though you call yourself an adult, we don’t think you have any cogent, mature, responsible, interesting ideas about our company, our products, our services, or our customers. You would spend all of your time telling us about your dog, and which pizzeria in your neighborhood has the best pepperoni-and-mushroom pizza.”

I suppose there was a similar reaction in Corporate America when employees first started showing up in the office with their own personal cell phones, their own PDAs, and their own laptops. All of that seems like ancient history these days, and maybe today’s reaction to corporate blogging will seem just as irrelevant five years from now. But in today’s environment, it’s still pretty bad. If I were Scott Adams (who, by the way, has a blog of his own), I’d have a whole new series of Dilbert cartoons to illustrate how employees react when the PHB (”pointy-haired boss,” for those unfamiliar with the acronym) begins blathering about the corporate blogging policy.