Sarah Palin's on LinkedIn

She's been on Facebook posting 'policy' statements for quite some time now, but Sarah Palin, ex Governor of Alaska and VP wish-a-be/wannabe has finally joined the ranks of the social media career-minded set, logging a profile on LinkedIn.

Palin's listing on LinkedIn was first reported yesterday by HuffPo, and since then, a second fuller profile has appeared, making one wonder if the first was a hoax or, more likely, an inept effort to edit the profile inadvertently resulted in the creation of a second. In itself, that's a clue to this crowd that someone at the helm isn't terribly confident with using the site.

As an executive recruiter, I'd counsel Palin to get herself a serious career coach. Her resume broadcasts a number of red flags (no media pun intended). Top three concerns:

1) Lack of staying power. A major hurdle for anyone above middle management; may be impossible to overcome when it's a thread throughout the career. First she switches among 5 colleges for no clear reason (only 3 are acknowledged on the LinkedIn resume) before completing a basic undergrad degree. Later she resigns a Chairperson role at the Oil and Gas Commission in frustration without finishing the job. Then she commits the ultimate faux pas: resigning the largest executive role in her career, the Governorship of Alaska, in mid term without apparent cause.


2) Inadequate preparation coupled with Lack of self-awareness. Palin's role as a small mayor of Wasila was inadequate experience for tackling the broader responsibilities of state and national office. Not acknowledging that for herself and failing to build her management skills in manageable (successful) stages indicates a critical lack of perspective and self-awareness --a key attribute on the emotional intelligence scale. Palin's most sustained executive experience, Mayor of tiny Wasilla, AL, is at best a first-rung small-town management training gig, poor preparation for the roles she subsequently attempted. In business parlance, this is like growing up in a seat-of-the-pants small business culture and thinking this qualifies you for a seat on the Executive Committee at GE. Not 'knowing what you don't know' is an immediate disqualifier for successful leadership. It's a real problem.

3) Personal Branding Issues: At the reference stage, a simple Google search will doom this candidate. What's all that stuff about ethics charges, gossip and dissonance on the home front, guns and animal cruelty, and incoherent TV interviews? And why has Senator John McCain, her #1 reference on LinkedIn, suddenly stopped endorsing her in public?

LinkedIn is a great site for a recruiter. This one will not be sending InMail to Sarah Palin.

Business Week and the Price of Timidity

Today is the end of an era, the sale of Business Week to Bloomberg, at a value so low that would have been impossible to contemplate when I was on the management team there in the early-mid 90's. What a difference 15 years could have made.

Back then, new media was new and, yes, ancillary; a few of us had the privilege of moving into roles dedicated to early experimentation with online media. For us, that meant being the skunkworks team responsible for launching BusinessWeek Online on AOL before that online service had its first million members; and then, planning the launch on the Web. We got it done on the cheap, subsidized by AOL itself which needed some big brands to grow its own business. Sometime between AOL and the Internet launch, I realized that the oportunity for further innovation in that culture over the next few years would be slow. So in '96 I went to a downtown push technology start-up (which my kids at the time referred to as iConfusion, but it really had another name!) The start-up had its own set of unique and memorable challenges; eight months there was a roller coaster ride that 10 years at McGraw Hill would never have matched. But it was exhilirating. At least the start-up's mistakes were exuberant failures of execution, rather than failures to try to see and catch the future.

The time for media companies to support experimentation, to learn, and set the stage for today's challenges was back then; ad revenues were high, cash flow was good, there was no immediate threat to the status quo. Andthat was precisely why top management kept the blinders on. It's only now -- with the industry in crisis mode and no rational excuses left -- that 'traditional' media businesses are finally serious about the change mantra.

As today's headlines show, timidity has its price.