13 September 2026 · 5 min read
The first edit I remember was not wrong. It was just not his.
A short word had been replaced with a longer one. The sentence still said roughly the same thing. I remember deciding it was a small loss and not worth an argument.
I was working for a company that had hired me to write for one of its most visible people. He had agreed to it. I do not think he understood how much of his own time and attention the work would ask for, and that is normal. The people I work with are busy and already successful. LinkedIn is real to them, but it is rarely the most important thing in their day.
The beginning was very good. I was learning how he thought, what he believed, what had shaped him. In person he was simple and warm. He knew a great deal and never needed to prove it. He did not use complicated words. That plainness was most of the reason people trusted him.
Then the drafts started going through marketing.
Nothing dramatic happened. Nobody rewrote a post from scratch. They would say a part sounded cheesy. They would swap a simple word for a more polished one. They would move a sentence a little closer to what the company wanted to say that quarter. Every single change was defensible on its own.
The posts got cleaner and less true.
He noticed before I was willing to admit it. He told me his friends could tell he was not writing them. They read like someone speaking on his behalf. He was right. His page had quietly become a company message with his name at the top.
My part
The marketing team is not the story, so let me be precise about my own part.
At the start I pushed. I brought ideas, I explained why a particular sentence mattered, I said when an edit was moving us away from him. Most of it was not used.
Then I made the mistake I now watch for in myself. I decided that because the company was large, they must know more than I did. I felt small next to them. So when the next change came, I said okay. And the next one. I followed every instruction and stopped doing the work they had actually hired me to do.
I was afraid that if I kept pushing back, they would realise I was too small to be in that room, and replace me with someone who looked like they belonged there.
There is something else in it, and it is not comfortable to write. The access flattered me. Sitting with someone like that, hearing how he really thinks, was part of why I took the work and part of why I was careful not to be difficult. Admiration and judgment do not sit well together. A name that impresses you can quietly make you easier to move.
He lost interest. In the end I lost the engagement.
I did not lose it by refusing to cooperate. I lost it by cooperating past the point where I was still useful to anyone.
What the story is actually about
For a long time I read this as a story about a difficult marketing team. It is not. It is a story about who owns a voice that somebody else is paying for.
When a company funds an executive’s presence, three people end up holding something close to a veto. The company, because it pays and carries the commercial risk. The principal, because it is his name and his reputation. The writer, because she is the only one in the room whose entire job is whether it still sounds like him. That arrangement works when everyone knows which decisions belong to whom. It falls apart quietly when nobody says it out loud, which is most of the time.
A company can pay for the work. It can set the approval path, flag legal and commercial risk, and decide what must never be published. All of that is legitimate and I want it in place. What a company cannot do is own the voice. The moment the final words stop sounding like the person whose name is on them, the thing stops working, and no amount of coordination brings it back.
That is the part people underestimate. It is not a taste question. A profile that sounds borrowed does not fail slowly and visibly. It fails at the exact moment it matters, when someone serious reads it before a meeting and does not believe it.
What I do differently now
The conditions come before the writing.
The principal has to want this himself. Not agree to it, want it. If the company starts the conversation, that is normal and I have no problem with it. But the person has to join the first call and take part properly in the early work, because that work is built out of how he thinks and what he would never say in public. Nobody can supply that on his behalf, however well they know him.
The approval path is written down before the first draft. Who reviews, who signs, in what order, and what each of them is actually deciding. Business risk belongs to the company. Voice belongs to me. When those two collide, it goes to the principal, not to whoever is most senior in the room.
And now I say the uncomfortable thing to the people who are actually making the change, on the day they make it. Not privately to the principal, where it costs me nothing. A sentence that no longer sounds like him is worth one awkward conversation with the team that rewrote it. It is not worth an argument three months later, when the page has drifted so far that the person whose name is on it has stopped reading his own posts.
The part I could have left out
One more thing, because leaving it out would make me look better than I was.
I did tell him, and he agreed. More than once, he encouraged me to push back and told me it was better to fail because of something we had tried than because of something we had been too afraid to try.
I still did not dare.
That is probably the hardest part to admit.
They hired me for judgment. Then I handed that judgment to the largest people in the room, for no better reason than that they were large. If they had known how to solve it themselves, nobody would have called me.
The permission I was waiting for had already been given. I was waiting for it from the wrong people.