Home

Sun

Sun's Schwartz: A Model for the Social Media CEO?

Authored by Rohit Bhargava on January 17, 2007 - 12:50pm.
This past weekend, the Saturday Interview in the business section of the NY Times focused on Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun.  Over the course of a single column, Schwartz shared more insight into the evolving media world (and how businesses should work) than most other CEO I have seen in the recent past.  Among his gems is the (sadly) rare understanding that lawyers only provide legal advice – they don't make the business decisions, unless you let them.  How many great ideas have we all seen die because businesspeople have taken legal advice as gospel and refused to question it?  The headline of the NY Times piece quips, "Sun's Chief Doesn't Fear the Snarky" – take this along with Schwartz's nuanced view of how to properly use legal advice, and there is an interesting point emerging.  Could it be that the simplest reason why we are not seeing more organizations embrace social media comes down to fear of snarkiness and fear of lawyers?
tags: Internet | Marketing | Law | Blogs | Tech | Social Media | Rohit | Sun | Jonathan Schwartz |