■ Why People Ask Tough Questions ■

During the tumultuous counterculture movement of the 1960s, Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary incited his followers to “turn on, tune in, drop out” and, citing the directive of the epigraph, to question the authority of existing social and political institutions.¹ Ben Franklin, as one of the founding fathers of the United States, is said to have urged its citizens, newly independent from British rule, to question authority.² And the famed Greek philosopher Socrates developed the use of argumentative question-and-answer dialogue to stimulate critical thinking—a framework we now know as the Socratic method.³

What these three vastly different men with vastly different points of view have in common is their advocacy of making provocative challenges to the status quo.

Mike Wallace and his legions of colleagues in journalism and the news media are descendants of that same thinking. But all of them take their challenges to a higher level of intensity. They are trained to operate by the first principle of the press: “if it bleeds, it leads.” Journalists are also keenly aware that conflict is drama, that drama sells ads on television and popcorn in movie theaters, and so journalists invariably unleash “gotcha” questions.

As a baseline, let’s examine one of Mike’s most prosecutorial interrogations: an interview he had with Richard Scrushy, the founder and CEO of HealthSouth, a publicly traded health care company (now known as Encompass Health). Scrushy had been accused by no fewer than five of his former CFOs of fraud. Mike, who was “astonished when [Scrushy] agreed to answer our questions,”⁴ began the interview by going right for the jugular:

You are supposed to be a crook. You know that. The SEC in effect says you are. Your former financial officers, chief financial officers, say you are—that Richard Scrushy inflated earnings and betrayed his stockholders, betrayed his employees.

Blinking rapidly, Scrushy replied:

There’s no evidence of any of that and—uh—many of the people have said it’s not true.

Glancing down at his notes, Mike read the evidence to him:

Tad McVeigh, CFO, until early this year, 2003, pled guilty, told the judge, “Richard Scrushy was aware that the financial statement contained numbers that were incorrect.”

His blinking now accompanied by facial tics, Scrushy protested:

This is—again—it’s not true. I haven’t—I haven’t…

With a grand wave of his arms and a sardonic smile, Mike said:

All these guys are liars, and you are a knight in shining armor.

Scrushy pleaded:

Mike, there’s 50,000 people—there are five—you have five people that have made these claims out of 50,000 people. Let me make a comment…

Mike narrowed his eyes and interrupted:

But you’re in charge. Come on. You are…

Scrushy frowned and leaned forward:

That doesn’t mean—okay—No, I did not. I did not! No. This—you’re not right!

Referencing his notes again, Mike provided more evidence:

McVeigh told the judge you tried to justify it by saying, quote, “All companies play games with accounting.”

Shaking his head, Scrushy replied:

I never said that to him, and he knows that.

Incredulous, Mike asked:

Why would these chief financial officers—what you’re saying is they committed the fraud? For what reason?

Scrushy raised his eyebrows and answered:

I didn’t—I certainly didn’t commit fraud. People know me they know I wouldn’t instruct somebody to do that.

Mike drove his point home:

What would be the motive of your CFOs to commit a fraud?

Blinking still, Scrushy responded:

I really don’t want to get into the detail, but every one of them has a motive.⁵

Each of the flaming missiles that Mike fired at Scrushy was targeted at the same issue—his alleged fraud—and, as each of them landed, Scrushy twitched defensively in response.

Karen Tumulty matches Mike Wallace missile for missile. Now a political columnist for The Washington Post, Tumulty spent 16 years as the congressional correspondent for Time magazine. During her tenure, she badgered the veteran Representative and Speaker of the House John Boehner so often that he complained about her in his memoir:

Some reporters will try to joke around and act friendly at first to try and disarm you before they throw you the real questions. Not [Tumulty]… She zeroed in on me like a hawk spotting a limping jackrabbit from a mile away.⁶

Most reporters aspire to emulate Mike Wallace and Karen Tumulty, but many often fall far short of the mark.

One who did was Krishnan Guru-Murthy, a journalist at Britain’s Channel 4. Trying his best to emulate Mike Wallace, he asked Hollywood director Quentin Tarantino about his film Django Unchained:

Why are you so sure there’s no link between enjoying movie violence and enjoying real violence?

Tarantino bristled:

Do not ask me a question like that. I’m not biting. I refuse your question.

Guru-Murthy persisted:

Why?

Tarantino told him why:

Because I’m here to sell my movie. This is a commercial for the movie, make no mistake.

Guru-Murthy challenged him:

Oh, so you don’t want to talk about anything serious.

Tarantino stood his ground:

I don’t want to talk about what you want to talk about. I don’t want to talk about the implications of violence. The reason I don’t want to talk about it is because I’ve said everything I have to say about it.

Guru-Murthy tried again:

No, but you haven’t fleshed it out.

Tarantino would not budge:

It’s not my job to flesh it out.

Trying to be gracious, Guru-Murthy smiled wanly and said:

No, it’s my job to try and ask you to.

Snickering, Tarantino barked:

And I’m shutting your butt down!

Undeterred, Guru-Murthy tried another angle:

But you have a responsibility as a filmmaker surely to explain a little bit about what you’re doing.

Tarantino stood firm:

I have explained this many times in the last twenty years. I just refuse to repeat myself over and over again because you want me to. For you and your show and your ratings!

Darting his eyes away, Guru-Murthy laughed nervously:

Oh—well, no—it’s not about—ah—ratings.

Leaning forward, Tarantino administered the knockout punch:

No, no, it is! It’s about what you want me to say for you, for your show, this show right here, right now!⁷

Given his daily practice of barking orders at actors, stagehands, and studio technicians on movie sets, Quentin Tarantino was not about to succumb to any reporter’s tough questions. But few people, businesspeople in particular, come equipped with Tarantino’s bravura.

■ Why Businesspeople Ask Tough Questions ■

Businesspeople, who are not concerned about show ratings, ask tough questions for entirely different reasons. Some are disciples of Socrates. They question everything to stimulate critical thinking. During a Suasive program I delivered to a group of Cisco managers in their Paris offices, one of them, Helene Poirier, repeatedly challenged my methodology. At the end of the session, Helene came up to me and explained that she wasn’t trying to be difficult, she was just doing what she had learned to do in the French education system:

We were taught to think with the “Cartesian” method, from the principles of René Descartes, the seventeenth-century philosopher. Whenever ideas are discussed, we look for all possible angles of view: What supports it, and who, how? What goes against it, and who, how? What conclusion, opinion, decision can we rationally draw?⁸

Other than the Socratic and Cartesian methods (the latter reads like a mission statement for reporters), the primary reason businesspeople ask challenging questions has to do with the inherent nature of presentations. Whenever you present, your goal is to get your target audience to change: to get prospective customers to buy a product or service they have never owned or to get existing customers to buy a new version of a product or service they already own.

In that highest stakes of all presentations, the IPO roadshow, the goal is to get investor audiences to change: to buy a stock that never existed. As a matter of fact, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission requires that offering companies specifically state their intentions in print. They must publish a prospectus containing a boilerplate sentence that reads, “There has been no prior public market for the company’s common stock.” In other words, “Invest at your own risk.”

Caveat emptor.

Change is the goal in almost every exchange in business, and most human beings are resistant to change, so they kick the tires.

You are the tires.

■ Blood Sport ■

A major component of an IPO is that the company’s senior management team sets out on the road, traveling around the country, and sometimes across oceans, for two weeks, pitching to investors in anywhere from 50 to 80 meetings. For many years, each meeting consisted of a live presentation followed by Q&A. With the advent of NetRoadshow, a website where anyone with a browser can view a streaming video of a company’s IPO roadshow, all that changed (see Figure 2.1).

Now, because most of the investors will have seen the streaming version, the meetings are essentially Q&A. But the grueling two-week tour, with just as many meetings, is still obligatory because no investor will commit to buying a tranche of tens of millions of dollars based on a canned presentation alone. Ideally, investors want to meet the executives in person, press the flesh, and look them in the eye. The COVID-19 pandemic made it necessary for those meetings to take place virtually. In time, many investors adapted to the physical separation but, whether live or virtual, investors want to engage with a company’s management team, discuss their business, and ask them questions directly.

One of those investors is David Bellet, the founder and former chair of Crown Advisors International, one of Wall Street’s most successful long-term investment firms. David, who was an early backer of many successful companies, among them Hewlett-Packard, Sony, and Intel, explained his intentions:

When I ask questions, I don’t really have to have the full answer because I can’t know the subject as well as the presenter. What I look for is whether the presenter has thought about the question; been candid, thorough, and direct; and how the presenter handles himself or herself under stress—if that person has the passion of “fire in the belly” and can stand tall in the line of fire.⁹

No one challenges presenters seeking to raise public financing more than Leslie Pfrang. Although Leslie and her partner Lise Buyer are now the principals of Class V Group, a boutique shop that advises companies on how to navigate the complex process of going public, Leslie spent decades as a managing director at both Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse, leading the positioning and placement of IPOs to public investors. As she puts it:

Public investors, unlike private VCs, cover and own several hundred companies. Steady as she goes is what they are looking for. They want to tuck it away, peek at the transcript once a quarter, and see that the management is performing to plan. That is it. No surprises and no drama. So, investors test new management teams with difficult questions, sometimes asking the same thing in different ways over and over, like a police interrogation, complete with the cigarette smoke. They are as interested in the way management responds under this pressure as they are the content of the answer. The ability of management to stay on message, not flail, and avoid appearing defensive is critical. If they can’t take the heat, the public investor will expect the stock will be volatile and will wait. It is better to vigilantly practice tough Q&A as a blood sport and feel the pain in private than on the public stage.¹⁰

The tough questions that David and Leslie ask as investors considering a stock purchase are no different from those of prospective customers considering a new product, prospective partners considering a strategic relationship, pressured managers considering a request for additional resources, concerned citizens considering a dark horse candidate, or even affluent contributors considering a donation to a not-for-profit cause. The challenge in all these situations is how to handle their questions.

One important caveat: All the Q&A techniques you are about to learn require that you deploy them with absolute truth. The operative word in the paragraph above, as well as on the cover of this book, is handle, meaning managing tough questions. While providing an answer is an integral part of that “handling,” every answer you give to every question must be honest, truthful, and straightforward. If not, all the other techniques will be for naught.

As the great American humorist Mark Twain is said to have put it:

If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.¹¹