Show me a CEO who truly believes that mobs are smart and crowds are wise and I’ll show you a nine-toed wombat.  As the continuing sordid saga at HP demonstrates, few executives make it to the top without acquiring unhealthy doses of paranoia and hubris along the way.  All too often, this leads to a bunker mentality in which the only opinion that counts is your own and control becomes the total focus of management.

My own experience in HQ culture tells me that HP chairman Patricia Dunn’s imprudent, and probably, illegal efforts to identify and smother an adversary were simply at the extreme end of business as usual.  The old Mort Sahl line:  “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not really trying to get you” is an all too common boardroom mantra.

And, as Steve Jobs discovered a few years back, even being a founder is no guarantee against a palace coup.

All of this is important  because it explains the uphill battle that social media face in gaining acceptance in large enterprises.  Public blogs, wikis and social networking sites all derive their power, and usefulness, from a high level of trust in individuals to be fair and honest and non-destructive.  You have to trust that the Wikipedia (or any other wiki) entry you read is accurate without knowing much or anything about the person who created it.  The usual indicators of trustworthiness–reputation, authority, areas of expertise, level of responsibility–are usually absent and have to be assumed. 

The same thing is generally true of public blogs, although more and more ”experts” with real-world reputations have joined the public fray and there is a greater understanding that blogs are an outlet for opinion and few of them actually get read much anyway. 

To idealists like Jimmy Wales and old hippies like Howard Rheingold, social media are a manifestation of democracy in action, the modern face of “power to the people.”  To CEOs and other control freaks, they are improvised explosive devices hidden along the road to organizational unity–especially when employees produce blogs that become popular in the outside world. 

Most technology bloggers wrote about what a “loss” it was for Microsoft to lose Robert Scoble and his friendly, well-trafficked, maverick blog to PodTech.  You could hear the sign of relief from Redmond in Los Angeles. 

None of this is meant to imply that social media won’t find a home within enterprises.  They will, but they will be limited to specific users and to specific projects.  They will be much more tightly controlled and tied to official communications policies. The anybody-can-play-with-absolute-freedom-of-expression notion is just not going to happen behind the firewall.

And, Debbie Weil notwithstanding, most CEOs of large enterprises are never going to blog because they don’t need the publicity and it only provides ammunition for rival companies, regulators, irate customers, and the people down the hall who want their jobs.

Think of how much fun it would be to go back and read through Patricia Dunn’s blog right now, if she had kept one.  All the stuff about integrity and the HP way.  All the noises about ethics.  It would be hysterical and cause even more embarassment for the company.

Still, we own Ms. Dunn a debt.  She’s proven that women executives can be just as vicious as the boys.