Hi Micah:

Thanks for your comment and for your kind words. Your point about anecdotal evidence vs. research is a fair one. That said, I’m in the opinion/advice business, not the research business. 

As to whether Harvard’s research is refutable based on this blog post – I’d ask you to form your own opinion. All I can share with you is that after working with chief executives for decades, I don’t know of a single CEO that would state their external facing activities held no value. But hey, it’s just my opinion:) Thanks for stopping by Micah.

While I have amazing respect for what you write, I am concerned about your response here. I have no doubt that what you have experienced is accurate, but I’m not sure you can effectively refute a Haravrd research project with a blog post based on what you assume people would say, can you? Maybe you should throw together a brief Google docs survey of your own and send it out to this pool of CEO’s so you can effectively show a different data set. That would seem to support what you are saying in this post.

Again, I greatly admire your blog and opinions. Just some thoughts for you. Maybe providing your own research to the contrary would be effective in this instance.

Micah
@groupthrive

Thanks for sharing your insights and observations. I agree with what you’ve expressed. Thanks for stopping by Sir.

Hi Gordon:

Thanks for sharing your experience. I agree with you that the evidence demonstrating the value of external facing activities is far from anecdotal. Even the most cursory examination daily news and events would offer support that value is often created through external activities. Thanks again for sharing Gordon. 

I believe as you do that CEO’s and other corporate leaders must interact with external constituencies and and further agree that those interactions do result in benefit to the corporations. I have had the pleasure of working with some reasonably well known CEOs and all of them were engaged in external contacts and all of them brought significant value to the company. Though anecdotal evidence is not sufficient, I believe there is sufficient hard evidence to prove your point that it shouldn’t be labeled as such.

Cheers,
Gordon

Thanks for your comment and for sharing the link Curt. I appreciate you stopping by.