indiana territory

Dupont's CEO has blog

Well, you start something and it's kind of fun and then you think, "Oh, I don't know, do I really want to do this? Can I really say what I want to say . . . remember, it has to be in my corporate voice."

Mike Schatzlein, CEO of Dupont Hospital down on, yes, Dupont Road in Fort Wayne began to blog recently. I stumbled across his first couple of entries when I was researching CarePages at Dupont and left a comment that I thought it was great he was blogging, or something along that line. I interviewed Dr. Schatzlein way back before Dupont opened and even got a nice tour of the building, which explains why I actually took notice of his blog in the first place.

I can still remember sitting in his temporary office talking about the hospital and I remember the PR people hurrying over to sit in on the interview. (Say, he was supposed to invite me to the opening, but I never received an invitation. Shoot! Think he forgot? Maybe he didn't like the finished article. Hey, I thought it was pretty good and complimentary. Okay, let me step back from the emotion.) I enjoyed learning about Dupont's aims and talking to Dr. Schatzlein about his career and change of focus from the practice of medicine to administration.

He first used the Jarvik 7 in Fort Wayne. (I THINK that is what he said.) Now he has written a post about Robert Jarvik and his commercial endorsement of Lipitor, which Mike and I both take - he says rather than cholesterol his primary reason is more because of "its mystical life-prolonging and mood-enhancing effects". I started taking it for my cholesterol, learned about the possible connection with overall lifespan benefits, but did not realize it was supposed to help my mood. If it does, maybe I have a really, really grumpy baseline. Or, perhaps, he means for it to be interpreted to mean a heightening of moods, i.e. better rages, funkier tantrums, more powerful pouting?

On with it. So I saw the Jarvik post today - but it was written/published on December 6, 2007; it was his 8th post. The next two posts were on the 16th of that month and the next and last post was on January 6, 2008. I read through all his posts and, my gosh, Evan Bayh's wife got $700,000 for serving on Anthem's Board? Ack! that is a lot of money. Sorry for that little diversion, my comment was going to be that he refers to having basically two readers in his second December 16 post, which talks about the frequency of his posting. He said he thought it would be weekly; daily wouldn't work. He figured it would be like a Sunday column and he told a nice little story about playing church basketball in 5th & 6th grade. I liked that. He didn't post again until January 6th. Of course, I hadn't checked in during this entire time, although I had thought about it. The thing was I had gotten caught up in a few of theCarePage stories.

I wonder . . . He writes very well and is, of course, very intelligent - did you know he fools around with computer innards, kind of like a surgeon? - so does he feel that he can't be himself in the blog, has to watch what he says. Heck, that would be a burden. Maybe he didn't think the blog thing through; I don't know.

What I do know is I would like to hear more of his opinions - because he's no dim bulb - and more of his personal stories - because I just plain out like that type of thing.

posted by Jody @ 2:19 PM