Blogging From The Top

Santiago Iñiguez, Dean of the Instituto De Empresa on blogging:

"Blogging has saved me time, made me more efficient and opened my eyes to a changing media, communication and management education landscape. It has been said that a complaint is worth its weight in gold and I could not afford to let this opportunity of having an open channel to customer feedback go past- you could say it is free CRM

"...  I jot down potential ideas for posts, or sources of information, which helps me better shape and clarify my own ideas and hence makes them easier to communicate. In fact, I use many of the posts and comments published in the blog -and their background research- later in meetings, speeches or presentations.

"Furthermore the discipline of finding newsworthy management education articles each morning means that I am more up-to-date with the sector and better able to react ... Blogging has also been an immense opportunity for networking. Interestingly, my experience is that most of the networking does not happen openly through participation in the blog but many of the readers contact me via email to address the discussed issues or to deal with other particular concerns."

I have personally had the priviledge of some personal exchanges with Professor Iñiguez, and I have always found him extremely couteous and generous with his time.

The potential for weblogs is far greater than just gratuitous self-promotion, which many still think to be the case with this medium of communication: blogs are fantastic marketing tools and can help readers delve into areas of life (such as Iraq) that otherwise are personally inaccessible, even for the most hardened journalist. Like the Dean, I too find the process of gathering and generating thoughts and ideas very helpful - certainly, as a naturally disorganised person it helps me to keep my thinking more efficient.

The overall benefits of weblogs are so tremendous, I wouldn't be surprised if this was standard practice in higher education pretty soon.