Is this the age of the unfiltered CEO?
Mark Zuckerberg’s recent conversation with podcaster Joe Rogan stays in my mind for a number of reasons. The idea of the world’s Nerd-in-Chief stripping off and shooting pigs with a bow and arrow was one of the more bizarre images to emerge from the chat, along with his slightly cringeworthy enthusiasm for fighting other men and smoking his own meat.
The Meta billionaire also talked about his concerns that corporate culture has become too feminised, and that more “masculine energy” would be a good thing at work. This line of argument has sparked some fierce debate – not least on the world’s HR platform, LinkedIn.
I’ll let others debate the cultural shift that Zuckerberg’s ideas may or may not represent, but the really interesting thing for me is simply that he said any of it all. Is it the case that, inspired by Donald Trump’s resurgence, Zuckerberg simply felt empowered – liberated, even – to say the sort of things that no self-respecting CEO, let alone a Silicon Valley CEO, would have dared to utter just a couple of years ago?
My wife spends a lot of time speaking to businesses and large employers all over the world, and last week she suggested to me that more and more bosses were going to embrace ‘unfiltered comms.’ She meant the kind of long-form podcast interview exemplified by Zuckerberg’s Rogan appearance; allowing for a more meandering, organic conversation in contrast to bland set-piece communication events that have come to dominate corporate comms.
She also wondered whether some CEOs, long trained in the language and talking points of acceptable views and ‘purpose driven’ values might follow Zuckerberg’s lead in changing what they talk about, not just how or where they say it.
For some, this might mean speaking more openly about their own views and opinions, empowered, perhaps, by what Zuckerberg calls the “masculine energy” that Trump’s victory has supposedly unleashed, but for many others it could just mean they stop discussing certain topics that have become de rigueur in recent years.
One person, recently back from Davos, told me yesterday that he’d already detected this shift among the power-players that mingled at the World Economic Forum. While the formal agenda was still laden with sessions on sustainability, purpose and equity, there was, frankly, a ‘vibe shift’ among the CEOs, particularly the American ones.
Not every CEO is a pig-slaying meat-smoker, desperate to reveal their authentic self – far from it, thank goodness – but it does feel as if the conversation around certain topics is starting to change, or at least that some people no longer feel obliged to be part of it.