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X (Twitter)

Something is badly broken in how we think about executive visibility,…

X (Twitter) post

Something is badly broken in how we think about executive visibility, and I don't think enough people are saying it plainly. The conventional wisdom is that content creation is a marketing team's job. You hire people for that. The CEO has bigger things to worry about. And I understand why that logic feels sensible — executives are busy, time is finite, and marketing is a function you delegate. But here's what that logic gets wrong: customers don't want content from your marketing team. They want to hear from you. No marketer in your organisation — no matter how talented — can substitute for the CEO's voice. Your perspective on the industry, your reasoning behind decisions, your read on where things are going. That's what builds trust. That's what attracts the kind of customers and talent and partners that actually matter. And right now, if you're not putting that voice out there, you're leaving it on the table while your competitors figure this out. Reid Hoffman said years ago that influence would become the most important currency of the internet age. I'll be honest — my first reaction was scepticism. I used to look down on influencers as being lesser marketeers. But what actually happened is that the bottleneck shifted. You can build products faster than ever. You can spin up software, run campaigns, launch offerings. The constraint isn't creation anymore. It's distribution. And distribution runs on reach and trust — which means it runs on the people who have earned an audience. That's the CEO. Not the content calendar. There's a talent dimension to this that gets completely overlooked. When executives are invisible publicly, they're invisible to the people they want to hire too. The best candidates are researching you before they apply. They're watching whether your leadership has anything interesting to say. A CEO who publishes real thinking — who demonstrates a point of view — is signalling something about the organisation's culture and ambition that a careers page simply cannot do. I see companies spending serious money on employer branding and talent acquisition while their own CEO has posted three times on LinkedIn in the last two years. That's not a budget problem. That's a priority problem. The good news is that this isn't as hard as it looks. The real stuff where you add value isn't the execution. It's the insight. Your customer stories. Your take on what's changing in your market. The decisions you're wrestling with right now. Forty-five seconds of voice notes captures that. You don't need to become a content creator in the traditional sense. You need to stop depriving your company of the one voice it has that nobody else can replicate. Delegating your voice is not a strategy.

Mark HadfieldJun 2, 2026Published to X - Mark HadfieldView original ↗

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