Writing publicly as a sitting CEO.

I write publicly while running a company, and I am asked, often with a note of suspicion, why a sitting CEO would spend time on it. The suspicion assumes the writing is either vanity or distraction, time taken from the real work to build a personal brand. I believe public communication is part of the CEO function in 2026, and done with discipline it makes me better at the job rather than taking time from it. This is the case for why, and the discipline that keeps it from becoming the thing the suspicion assumes.

Writing is reasoning made visible

The first function of public writing is that it forces the reasoning to be good enough to survive being seen. A thought that stays in my head can be vague, half-formed, and internally inconsistent, and I will not notice, because unexamined thoughts are generous to themselves. The same thought written for a reader who will judge it has to be complete, ordered, and defensible, and the act of getting it to that standard improves the thinking itself.

The discipline of writing a clear argument about pricing, or turnaround sequencing, or market entry, forces me to actually resolve the questions I would otherwise leave comfortably unresolved. The writing is a forcing function for the reasoning, and the reasoning is the job. A CEO who writes clearly about the decisions they make is a CEO who has been forced to think clearly about them, and the clarity carries back into the decisions.

Writing for myself, in a private note, does not carry the same forcing function, because I am a lenient reader of my own private thoughts. Writing for a public that includes people who know the subject better than I do raises the standard the argument has to meet, and the raised standard is the point. The competence the writing displays is real competence, because the writing could not reach the standard without the reasoning behind it being sound, which is why public reasoning is a display of competence that cannot be faked at length.

The discipline of writing without breaching confidence

Confidential information is a real constraint and it is the constraint that most sitting CEOs use as the reason not to write at all, because it seems impossible to write anything specific enough to be useful without drawing on the specifics that are confidential.

It is not impossible, but it requires a specific discipline: write the pattern, never the instance. The turnaround I ran is confidential in its particulars, the client, the numbers, the specific decisions, but the pattern I extracted from it is mine to share, and the pattern is what is useful to a reader anyway. The reader does not need my confidential specifics; they need the transferable lesson, and the transferable lesson is exactly the part that is not confidential. The discipline is to abstract to the pattern and stop there, never reaching for the specific instance to make the point more vivid, because the vividness is where the breach lives.

This discipline has a useful side effect: it makes the writing more valuable, not less. The specific instance is interesting to me and to the people who were there, but the pattern is what is useful to a stranger in a different company facing a similar situation. Writing the pattern rather than the instance is both what keeps the confidence and what makes the writing worth reading, which is a rare case where the ethical constraint and the quality goal point in the same direction. The writing that respects the confidence is also the writing that generalises, and the writing that generalises is the writing that helps.

Why CEO writing differs from founder writing

A sitting CEO writes from a different position than a founder does, and the difference shapes what the writing can and should be. The founder writes as the person whose company is an extension of themselves, and the founder’s writing is expected to be evangelical, visionary, and bound up with the company’s story. The CEO, especially an incoming or professional CEO, writes from a more detached position, and the detachment is an asset the writing can use.

The CEO can write about the craft of running a company with a distance the founder cannot, because the CEO’s identity is not fused with any single company the way the founder’s is. I can write about turnaround as a discipline, about pricing as a craft, about the patterns that repeat across companies, because I have run more than one and my perspective is that of someone who practises the craft rather than someone defending the one company that is their life’s work. The founder’s writing is about their company; the professional CEO’s writing can be about the work itself, and the work itself is a richer and more transferable subject.

This also means the CEO’s writing has to avoid a specific trap the founder does not face: it must not turn into marketing for the current company. The moment a sitting CEO’s public writing becomes a promotional channel for their employer, it loses the credibility that made it worth reading, because the reader can no longer tell the reasoning from the sales. The discipline is to write about the craft in a way that stands independent of the current company, so that the writing would be true and useful even if I ran a different company tomorrow. The writing is about the work, not the employer, and keeping that line clean is what keeps the writing honest.

Who I actually write for

The last piece of the discipline is knowing the audience, because writing without a clear reader in mind drifts into writing for everyone, which is writing for no one. I do not write for the widest possible audience, and the pieces that try to reach everyone are the weakest ones. I write for a specific reader: another executive facing the decisions I write about, who wants the transferable lesson from someone who has actually made the call rather than the theory from someone who has only studied it.

That reader is demanding in a useful way. They can tell the difference between real experience and repackaged theory, they have no patience for the generic, and they are exactly the audience whose respect is worth earning, because they are the peers, the potential partners, the potential future colleagues, and the people whose judgment of my competence actually matters. Writing for that reader keeps the writing specific and honest, because that reader punishes the vague and the fake immediately, and writing to survive their judgment is what keeps the standard high.

The audience is not customers, and this matters. If I wrote for customers, the writing would drift toward the promotional, and the demanding peer reader would see the drift and discount the whole body of work. Writing for the peer keeps the writing at the level the peer demands, and the customer who reads it encounters something better than marketing precisely because it was not written for them. The counterintuitive result is that writing for the demanding peer rather than the customer produces writing that serves the business better, because credibility with peers is worth more than promotion to customers, and credibility is what the writing builds.

Open communication

Writing publicly as a sitting CEO is a deliberate decision to treat public reasoning as part of the job, subject to a discipline that keeps it honest: write the pattern not the instance, keep the confidence absolutely, write about the craft rather than the employer, and write for the demanding peer rather than the customer or the crowd. Held to that discipline, the writing makes the reasoning sharper, displays a competence that cannot be faked, and builds the kind of credibility that compounds over a career rather than the kind of attention that evaporates.

The suspicion that a sitting CEO who writes must be neglecting the job has it backwards. The writing, done with discipline, is the job, or at least a part of it that the best version of the role now includes. The CEO who writes clearly about the work is a CEO who has been forced to think clearly about the work, and the thinking is what the company is paying for. Writing is where I do some of my best thinking in public, under the discipline that public thinking requires, and that discipline is the whole point.