Fake Steve Jobs was Inspired by Naked Conversations

Dan Lyons, sometime Forbes Journalist and sometime executive blog impressionist is interviewed in the Seattle Times. In it he says that he was inspired to create his Fake Steve Jobs
blog by Naked Conversations and our advocacy of CEO transparency an
idea he finds pretty inane.

"...there was a whole thing about naked conversations and radical
transparency, and you had guys like [Sun CEO] Schwartz and Bob Lutz at
GM doing CEO blogs. And I thought it was the most preposterous idea
ever. It was so silly. And it was so fake. They weren't honest at all.
They weren't transparent.

If people really did take Scoble seriously, and some CEO said I'm going to be nakedly transparent, radically transparent, what would that be like if some CEO went off the rails, and PR couldn't control him, and he was going to say whatever he wanted to say. And I thought that would be a funny blog and that was part of the impetus."

He also says that Ballmer is a good guy and Schwartz is not. I guess we'll have to take his word for it.

It's nice to know that a journalist for one of the world's top business publications believes that transparency from executives is a preposterous idea.

Lyons is also the gifted journalist who wrote the Forbes cover story on bloggers a while back, the one that lead with: "Web logs are the prized platform of an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective. Their potent allies in this pursuit include Google and Yahoo."

Get the rope, I say.


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