EXECUTIVE COMMUNICATIONS
Writing for the People Who Set the Agenda
THE SITUATION
Technical leaders are usually the worst-served people in a communications org. They have the most credibility to lend to a launch and the least time to write about it.
The gap between what they know and what they're able to publish is where most executive voice work either adds real value or turns into generic, over-handled corporate copy that nobody believes came from the person whose name is on it.
My job across IBM and Microsoft Research was to close that gap without flattening the executive's actual voice into something interchangeable.
To Be An Exec…
The work only holds up if the voice is real, so my process started before any post got written. I studied each executive directly, in meetings, on podcast appearances, in talks and public moments, to understand how they actually thought about a given topic and where their opinions genuinely sat.
That let me work proactively instead of reactively: proposing content the moment I saw an opening rather than waiting for the executive to come to me with something they wanted to say.
The same groundwork let me prepare them ahead of media appearances, events, and other public moments, coaching not just what to say but how to say it in a way that sounded like them.
DEFINING EXECUTIVES
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is where I did the most hands-on work. When we started, he had around 3,000 followers and posted infrequently. By the time I left IBM, that number had grown to over 14,000. I began increasing his posting volume by writing his take, his opinion, his angle on whatever IBM Quantum had just shipped or announced, essentially giving him a running point of view on the news rather than waiting for him to find time to write one himself. I'd ghostwrite the bullets, the core argument and structure, and he'd layer his own flavor on top depending on how he was feeling about the topic that day.
That collaboration is visible in a post like his response to NIST's post-quantum cryptography standards announcement, one of many where his public commentary tracked the news cycle in near real time instead of lagging behind it by weeks.
Across every executive I wrote for, posts I drafted averaged roughly three times the performance of that person's typical, self-written posts, a consistent enough lift that it became the expectation rather than the exception.
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at Microsoft Research got a different model: what I called Social Toolkits. For interesting papers, launches, blog posts, and events, I built fully packaged kits, all the copy, assets, tips, and platform-specific variants, written entirely by me and handed off ready to post.
Doug's toolkits covered things like the Agentic Economy piece and the OptiMind model overview.
Ashley's covered launches like Aurora 1.5 and the Paza Playbooks series. This model gave both leaders a finished product rather than a blank page, so their only job was choosing what to publish and when.
I ran the same toolkit model for podcast rollouts too, building out full kits for The Shape of Things to Come episodes with Doug, matched to an established template so the format stayed consistent episode over episode.
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For moments where the story reached beyond MSR into company-wide territory, I wrote for Satya Nadella directly when the topic warranted his voice, posts like the BioEmu launch and GigaTime.
At IBM, I did the same large-scale launch writing for Jay Gambetta, Dario Gil, and Arvind Krishna, including Krishna's own post on the 2025 fault-tolerant quantum computing roadmap announcement.
EXECUTIVE POV
This is the case study that separates a content marketer from a communications strategist who can operate at the executive level. Anyone can write a company blog post.
Very few people can take a technical leader's actual thinking, translate it into something publishable in their voice, and do it fast enough and often enough that the leader starts showing up as a real voice in their field instead of an occasional press quote.
That's the skill a Director of Executive Communications role is actually testing for, and it's the one I've now proven twice, at two different companies, with two very different working styles.
