Page 249 - Executive Warfare

The New Bosses

I suggest that you talk to reporters regularly. If for no other reason, do
it to keep yourself on your game mentally and to make sure that you can
talk to them when you really need to.
Make no mistake about it. As a senior executive, you may now earn five
or ten or twenty times what most reporters make, but I can guarantee you
that those reporters were the smartest people in their college classes. They
just chose a different path than you did.
These are worthy adversaries. And by middle age, these reporters have
seen some of their peers who are not as smart endowing new buildings on
college campuses while they are struggling just to pay tuition for their kids.
Some of them view this as a great injustice because they consider them-
selves truth-tellers and think any righteous society would reward them.
While most of them are scrupulously
fair, if they do find a reason to take you
down, they may not be entirely sorry. AN INTERVIEW IS A
So be prepared when you talk to them. LOT LIKE A GAME
It’s a bad idea to try to squeeze in an inter- OF POOL. IT’S NOT
view when you are just coming off an air- JUST ABOUT
plane and are tired or in the 15 minutes MAKING THE SHOT;
between meetings. It’s an especially bad IT’S ALSO ABOUT
idea to be unprepared for a television SETTING UP THE
interview, which can then live on in NEXT SHOT.
YouTube infamy. Have your staff prepare
Q&As for you. Even do a mock interview
with your staff if the interview is very important. Before I appeared on TV, I
made sure that I had half an hour alone to think about what I wanted to say.
Don’t soliloquize in interviews. Give short answers that cannot be taken
out of context. You may even make it a condition of the interview: “Sure,
I’ll talk to you. But I have one thing I want to say, and you must agree to
print it.”
Understand, however, that an interview is a lot like a game of pool. It’s
not just about making the shot; it’s also about setting up the next shot. So,

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