Mackey admits that, between 1999 and 2006, he posted opinions about his company, his industry, and others under the pseudonym Rahodeb (an anogram for his wife Deborah's name).
While his postings were personally and professionaly dangerous, they do not appear to have been illegal. but being a corporate executive officer should not prevent our best and brightest from participating in online social, political, and business related discussions.
We should all be uncomfortable with a CEO tilting public opinion about his own company. Executives, have priveleged access to corporate information, so, like other public figures they should be held to a higher level of public scrutiny. They also have a fiduciary responsibility to protect their investors from adverse reaction to their personal opinions.
We also need to protect our exectuives ability to express their personal views. Corporate executives include some of our country's best and brightest. Pseudonyms or "pen names" can give them an opportunity to put new views in the public domain without putting their corporation's investors at risk. Authors like Mark Twain and Bill O'Rielly use pen names to protect one set of interests from others. Why should we expect CEOs to be one dimensional?
Comments