Big problem with CEO communication: CEOs are boring

PR agency owner Richard Edelman keeps saying his life is fascinating, but reading about it is anything but

As owners of global PR agencies go, Richard Edelman is probably about as down-to-earth as they come. (He’s from Chicago, where we don’t let guys get too big for their britches.) And since it’s only a PR agency he’s in charge of, Edelman is probably a hell of a lot more down with the peeps than most of the Fortune 1000 CEOs.

Plus, being a PR guy, Edelman can actually write a little bit.

So you’d assume, wouldn’t you, that he’d be kind of a best-practice exemplar of the ideal CEO blogger?

Instead, Edelman is becoming, in our mind, an example of why CEO blogging—and the notion of any frequent first-person CEO communication—is and probably always will be, a rare and mostly dismal phenomenon.

We’ve been reading Edelman’s blog for three years, with decreasing frequency. Why? With the occasional exception, his entries are too long, too “Letter-from-the-CEO”-ish, too egg- headed and, worst of all, just plain boring.