Our CEO posts on LinkedIn three times a week: sharp, personal, confidently voiced observations about leadership, hiring, and the occasional vulnerable admission about a hard quarter. Almost none of it is written by our CEO. We'd like to explain how this actually works, because the posts are real opinions, genuinely held, just not typed by the person whose name sits under them.
The input: a 30-minute voice memo
Once a week, our CEO talks into their phone for half an hour, unstructured, about whatever's on their mind — a hiring decision, a frustration with a vendor, something they read that annoyed them. This is the only part of the process that's unambiguously, entirely the CEO's own. Everything downstream of this recording is produced by someone else, working from the transcript.
The ghostwriter's actual job
A hired writer — sometimes in-house, often a contractor who does this for six other executives simultaneously — takes the thirty minutes of rambling and finds the one idea inside it that has shape: a clean opening line, a three-sentence story, a turn, a lesson. This is a real editorial skill, genuinely difficult, and the writer is doing real creative work. What they're not doing is having the thought. The thought was the CEO's. The shape it takes — the hook, the line breaks, the "here's what nobody tells you about X" structure — is the writer's, applied the same way across every executive client on their roster.
Why the posts across different CEOs sound so similar
Because they're frequently written by the same small pool of ghostwriters, trained on the same handful of high-performing post structures, applying the same formula — short sentence, line break, slightly longer sentence, line break, a specific number, a turn, a takeaway — regardless of whose name goes on top. Two CEOs who have never met, running completely different companies, often sound like the same person, because in a meaningful structural sense, for about ninety seconds of reading, they are.
The approval step
The CEO reads the drafted post before it goes out, which is where most executives draw the line between "ghostwritten" and "fake" — they didn't write the words, but they did sign off on the thought, usually with one or two edits to make a detail more accurate or soften a claim that reads sharper than they'd actually say out loud. This step is real and matters. It's also a much lighter form of ownership than "wrote this," and the post never discloses which one actually happened.
Why nobody discloses this
Because "ghostwritten" reads, to most audiences, as closer to "fake" than it actually is, even though plenty of books, speeches, and op-eds have operated this way for decades with far more open acknowledgment. LinkedIn thought leadership specifically trades on a voice that feels personal and immediate — "I almost didn't post this" works because it implies the person typing it is the person who lived it, in the moment, which is precisely the implication a ghostwriting process quietly breaks without ever saying so.
What we're not saying
We're not saying ghostwritten executive content is dishonest at its core — the opinions are usually real, the editorial craft is genuinely skilled, and plenty of excellent writing throughout history has been produced this way with the credited person fully endorsing every word. We're saying the specific genre convention — writing in first person, in a voice implying real-time authorship — creates an impression of immediacy that a thirty-minute voice memo and a hired editor don't actually deliver.
Our recommendation
Keep the process — it produces better writing than most executives would manage alone under deadline, and that's a legitimate reason to use it. Just be honest, at least internally, about what "I write my own LinkedIn posts" actually means in your organization, because the gap between the voice memo and the published post is usually bigger than anyone outside the process realizes.
If your own executive's "personal" posts are produced by a ghostwriter working from a weekly voice memo, email us at contact@b2bsaas.guru. We'll help you refine the process. We will not be disclosing who wrote this one.