The Quiet Risk Inside a Loud Trend

Blog

Apr 14

By Jens Heitland

Last week, The Economist published a piece called "Every company is now a media company—and every boss a star." It is worth reading.

The article describes what it calls the chatter-industrial complex. Sam Altman buying a podcast. Jamie Dimon planning a media career after JPMorgan. Nicolai Tangen hosting one of the most-listened-to investor shows in Europe. Deloitte and KPMG producing dozens of podcasts each. Even Vodafone running a show about stationery.

The diagnosis is accurate. CEO visibility is no longer optional.

I want to write about what the article does not say.

Most leaders I speak with read a piece like this and feel one of two things. Either a quiet pressure to start posting more. Or a quiet relief that they already do.

Both reactions miss the point.

The shift the article describes is not about volume. It is about who gets to define a leader before the leader walks into the room. A decade ago, that definition was shaped by a small number of journalists and analysts. Today it is shaped by podcasts, search results, social platforms, and increasingly by AI systems that summarise a person before any human reads about them.

This is a structural change. It does not reward the loudest voice. It rewards the most coherent one.

The Economist piece is honest about the failure modes. Peter Thiel spent a decade writing about ideas that lived quietly in his essays. They became a problem only when he started saying them on podcasts. Marc Andreessen has popularised words his own investors would prefer he had not. The article calls it "a shallow victory."

I would call it something else. I would call it the predictable outcome of treating visibility as content rather than as infrastructure.

Content is produced and forgotten. Infrastructure is designed once and compounds for years. A CEO who treats visibility as content will measure success in views and impressions. A CEO who treats it as infrastructure will measure it in the questions they no longer have to answer, the meetings they no longer have to take, and the trust that arrives before they do.

These are different businesses. They look the same from the outside. They are not.

There is one sentence in the Economist piece that I think most readers will skim past.

"The brands of bosses often supplant those of their firms."

This is the most important line in the article. It is also the one that should make every board uncomfortable.

When the leader's reputation becomes more legible than the institution's, two things happen. The institution becomes more fragile. And the leader becomes more responsible. Most CEOs I work with have not yet decided whether they want this. The market has decided for them.

A few weeks ago, my team at Heitland Media Group finished a round of strategic audits with CEOs across several industries. The pattern repeated itself. Almost every executive had a presence. Almost none had a position. They were visible in the way that a building is visible. Recognisable, but not understood.

The work, when it is done well, is not about producing more. It is about deciding what the leader actually stands for, and then making sure everything that follows is in service of that decision. Podcasts, posts, interviews, keynotes. These are outputs. They are not the strategy. They become useful only after the strategy exists.

The Economist ends its piece on a note of mild concern. I will end on a more direct one.

If your visibility today is the sum of accepting podcast invitations and posting on LinkedIn when something occurs to you, you do not yet have a strategy. You have a habit. In a market where Sam Altman is buying his own talk show, a habit will not hold.

The question worth sitting with is not whether to be visible. The Economist has settled that.

The question is whether the visibility you are building today is the reputation you want to be known for in five years.

That question is rarely answered in a single conversation. But it is almost never answered without one.

Jens Heitland, CEO Heitland Media Group BV