Many Executives Use Numerous Email Addresses, But Few Adopt Alter Egos
March 15 2017 - 5:47PM
Dow Jones News
By Vanessa Fuhrmans and Joann S. Lublin
The news that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson used an email
alias while he was chief executive of Exxon Mobil Corp. surprised
much of the business world -- if only for his moniker's
creativity.
Many executives have an alternate company email address, or even
two or three, business leaders and executive coaches say. But it is
rare that those aliases take on an entirely different identity.
Much of America learned this week of
"Wayne.Tracker@exxonmobil.com," an address the New York attorney
general says Mr. Tillerson used to discuss climate change. ("Wayne"
is Mr. Tillerson's middle name.) The oil company says its former
CEO used the email account to talk about a broad array of topics
with senior executives.
"I have never heard of anything like that before," said Steven
Odland, CEO of the Committee for Economic Development, a
business-led public policy group.
Mr. Odland led Office Depot Inc. until 2010 and previously was
chief executive of AutoZone Inc., an auto-parts retailer. While a
corporate CEO, he realized company outsiders could find him once
they figured out the organization's convention for email addresses,
he recalled.
"You get buried" with unwanted external messages, and "important
stuff cannot get through," he said.
So Mr. Odland said he sometimes used a private but recognizable
email address that differed from the company's conventional
format.
The State Department referred questions regarding Mr.
Tillerson's email to Exxon Mobil.
Exxon said in a statement it has provided more than 2.5 million
pages of documents in response to a subpoena from New York Attorney
General Eric Schneiderman's office -- which is investigating
whether the energy company misrepresented its understanding of
climate change to investors and the public -- and will respond to
the claims in court.
There is a distinction between using an alternate email address
and adopting an alter ego, said Davia Temin, chief executive of
reputation- and crisis-management firm Temin & Co., who says
such an alias is often an attempt to maintain privacy "in such a
porous world." She advises against the urge. Even if messages from
the alternate address circulate solely among company executives,
"it looks as if it is meant to hide" something, she said.
More common, Ms. Temin says, is for executives to set up a
social-media alias to join a Twitter conversation or other debate
without disclosing their identities. Reddit CEO Steve Huffman has
said, for instance, that when he and his co-founder were trying to
make the website popular more than a decade ago, they registered
multiple screen names to create the appearance of a community.
Some chief executives use aliases to "mine Twitter accounts and
post things on social media just to get their finger on the pulse"
of their rapidly changing world, said Jeffrey Cohn, managing
director for global CEO succession planning at recruiters DHR
International.
He says leaders who do so run the risk of revealing sensitive or
questionable information that could be traced back to them "because
as CEO, no else would have that information."
Write to Vanessa Fuhrmans at vanessa.fuhrmans@wsj.com and Joann
S. Lublin at joann.lublin@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
March 15, 2017 17:32 ET (21:32 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2017 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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