A CEO of a corporation starts a blog, anonymously. Interesting.

He speaks like such a CEO:

[...]But I also feel that this study is yet another example of IT propaganda. The IT industry is always trying to convince those outside of IT that IT matters, that if you don't spend enough money on IT it will hurt your company.

But most of us are not convinced. IT is not a profit center, it's a cost center. Once your IT department grows past the minimum size needed to maintain your company, additional money spent on IT is a loss. But IT is always trying to shake down extra unnecessary money in order to bleed away profits.

Talking about President Bush's last State of the Union address:

[...]But Libertarian Girl wrote, "I started losing attention because I see right through that phony Oprah Winfrey stuff."

What Libertarian Girl forgets is that we live in a democracy, and people like Libertarian Girl, who are intelligent and logical about things, are in a minority at the voting booth. Bush has to sell his speech to the average American who is probably an Oprah Winfrey viewer.

Responding to an accounting student who aspires to senior management in a company:

[...]First off, I commend you for being interested in senior management. So many kids these days have impractical ideas about becoming actors or artists. I'm glad to see your head is grounded in the realities of our economy.

I find it terribly interesting to understand a person's worldview (to borrow a phrase from Ignatius Reilly). I'm guessing that to the author of CEO blog, a world filled with people focused entirely on accumulating wealth and power seems like a good place. I'm imagining the author would say something about the efficiency of market-driven economies. I imagine that to the author of CEO blog, having a college student "aspire to senior management" seems like ambition.

I see it as a sad development. A death to be mourned.

The student writes, "The thing that I have always wanted to do is run a company or at least a profit center." Who talks this way? I aspire to run a profit center? Good God.

Aspire to help people. Aspire to create beauty, or to seek truth. Aspire to happiness. Dream of something worthy of dreams.

But "run a profit center?"

Lest someone accuse me of hypocrisy, yes, I'm in management, too. But I don't want to work with people who rate as their greatest aspiration to run a profit center. And I certainly don't want to work for someone like that. Someone with such goals may well achieve them, but with what ethical grounding, by what means? If control of a company is the goal, if wealth is the only end, what means will a person be able to justify? What collateral damage would be justifiable while achieving these ends?

This is where I disagree with the author of the CEO blog. Aspirations should be large. They should be world-changing and for the public good. I'm disappointed that the author doesn't acknowledge this.