I'm the CEO

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My friend Andrew Meister invited me to attend a book signing in January for CEO turned author Brad Jacobs.

We arrived early and ordered drinks. There was a guy standing off to the side by himself, so we walked over to say hello.

“What brings you to the event?” I asked.

He said he has a friend who is a friend of Brad’s.

“Same as me!” I said.

We talked about the weather and where he grew up on Long Island and how his daughter recently moved to New York City.

His badge said “Steven, Xerox.”

At some point I glanced at his badge and asked: “What do you do at Xerox?”

“I’m the CEO,” he said. 

It was Steve Bandrowczak, who was promoted to run the company in August 2022. 

I felt like a bit of a dope. There is an unwritten rule that you are supposed to recognize bigwigs.

On the other hand, once you get outside a small batch of CEOs like Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Warren Buffett and Jamie Dimon, the name and face recognition drop off pretty quickly.

Another big factor has been the decline in media coverage. There are fewer newspapers and fewer magazines and fewer journalists. Also, more and more stories are behind paywalls.

It seems like corporate coverage has suffered in particular. When the media does cover companies, they often crowd into a small patch, focusing on the Magnificent Seven, because that’s where the clicks are.

Xerox gets an average of about 12 news stories a day, compared with 947 for Nvidia, 918 for Tesla and 812 for Microsoft.

That data comes from a nifty function on the Bloomberg terminal built by my former colleague Jonathan Greenberg. Type WATC <go>!

Last year, Bandrowczak appeared in just 242 news stories on the Bloomberg terminal. 

One option for the executives who run the 493 companies in the S&P 500 that aren’t the Magnificent Seven would be to post more often on social media.

Bandrowczak has a respectable 16,000 followers on LinkedIn, though that count would likely be much larger if he posted more engaging content more often.

So far this year, he has posted twice, both times links to Fortune articles. 

My advice to him and other CEOs would be the same for everyone:

-Post a few times a month 

-Share original insights

-Write things people will share

-Summarize key takeaways to make it accessible

-Don’t link to news articles 

-Don’t be promotional 

-Dispense with cringe office visit photos!

There are now an estimated eight PR professionals for every reporter in America.

It’s not going to get any easier to get media coverage. 

If you want to be visible these days, you probably need to tell your own story.

BRIEF OBSERVATIONS

AI O’SHAUGHNESSY: Jim O’Shaughnessy is an influential money manager and podcaster and evidently soon the creator of a new Large Language Model for financial writing. I love that he’s kept the notebooks. A reminder to us all.

YOU WILL ALWAYS BE SURPRISED: A reminder that the dynamics of nature are beyond mathematical comprehension and prediction.

ISOLATION & LONELINESS: There has been much written about the modern epidemic of isolation, but this chart captures how it is affecting teens.

TIME WAITS FOR NO MAN: Sobering juxtaposition of photos of the Titanic before it sailed and then, many years after it sank. Nothing lasts forever.

NORRIS CHURCH MAILER: Banger of a lead from a 2010 New York Times profile of Norris Church Mailer, an amazing woman who was Norman Mailer’s sixth wife. She once said of their tumultuous marriage: “I bought a ticket to the circus, I don’t know why I was surprised to see elephants.”