A blueprint for a cogent CEO blog

Engineering firm Black & Veatch’s big boss engages the staff with relevance and brevity

Engineers are said to enjoy reading long reports.

So it might have come as a bit of a surprise when Black & Veatch, a global engineering and construction firm, launched a concise internal blog from its company’s CEO, Len Rodman. How would employees react to reading such quick bites of news and information?

Very well, say leaders from the company’s communications team.

Rodman writes his own copy. Sometimes the blogs are as short as 30 words, sometimes as many as 400. To make sure Rodman’s pieces would be pithy, the communications team encouraged him to write the blogs from his BlackBerry. Not only did this help Rodman write more succinctly, but it also showed him how the blog posts would look online.

Rodman can write as little or as much as he wants, but within the first two weeks of the launch, he’s posted five blogs. In his first offering, he wrote about the blog’s purpose and how employee feedback would be helpful to him as CEO, says Linda Lea, the manager of media relations, marketing, and communications.