I asked one of the Szpalty Roku competition jurors about his impressions after having read nearly 100 magazines submitted to the 2013 edition. At first, I heard a conventional answer: “Yes, it was very interesting.” But after a moment of hesitation, he added: “But you know, you get those CEOs everywhere. Before I even managed to read the title of the magazine, I was bombarded with a huge photo of the CEO, followed by his long reasoning. Does each issue of a magazine need to show the CEO?”
A good question. Why do we actually always print an editorial by the CEO? Maybe because most of employees never get a chance to see the CEO, and the editorial offers them such possibility. We can take that path and say the editorial is a chance for them to meet the CEO, to get to know him, and to feel a stronger link to the company. An editorial is a great communication platform – the president can speak to his people. And here a problem arises: the CEO is indeed delivering speeches, talking to employees, but not talking with them. He utters well-built, round sentences that have little in common with most employees’ everyday life. Why is it so? There may be many reasons. The most trivial one – and probably the most frequent – is that the CEO’s editorial is not written by himself, but by his assistant. The assistant has learnt to protect the boss from the outer world, and it’s not the assistant’s job to present the CEO as an available and open person, eager to make contact with employees. Or it may be written by a spokesperson, who all the time is trying to convince journalists that the CEO is a wise and competent person, so his job is to deliver speeches, and not to chat with employees. The editorial may also be written by someone from the Communications Department, who must do it somewhere between an announcement for employees and a report for the Board. All that person cares about is that the text gets accepted, so he or she writes something general, without any problematic details.

And so employees get what they get. Meanwhile, you need very little to get the CEO speak a human language. Why not persuade the CEO to write the editorial himself twice a year, instead of placing “his” empty words in each issue. Let him tell people something important, interesting, something that matters. He should forget about trivial statements and tell a story, admit to a weakness, have the courage to reveal his human qualities. A CEO like that in a custom magazine – that would be something! But before anyone has the guts to start a new trend, we’ll print many more CEOs’ speeches disguised in pretty words – after all, it is them who pay for the magazine.
The text appeared in the magazine Content Marketing Polska 2013.