CHAPTER

1

Clueless

A presentation cannot make a career, but a presentation can undo a career.

—Bryan Lamkin

As a mid-level manager, you are accustomed to leading your own meetings. You may be a very successful leader with 30 or 300 people under you. In your quarterly off-site meetings with your entire team, your presentations are enthusiastically received. You are a respected and successful leader. Your career is on track. The problem is, when you walk into those quarterly review meetings with the C-level staff, all bets are off.

The stakes could not be higher. Your job, your project, and the jobs of those people who report to you hang in the balance every time you get up to present to senior leadership. This is make or break time. Many a boardroom has been bloodied by the carnage left in the wake of an unprepared speaker, clueless about the rules of the game. It happened to me.

How I Went Down in Flames

I confidently walked into Dick Anderson’s spacious office at the Hewlett-Packard Computer Systems Division in Cupertino, California. I was manager of our quality publications and training programs. The year was 1982 and I was just two years into my business career. It was my first meeting with a real senior executive. I was accompanied by my boss, Ilene Birkwood, the functional manager of Quality Assurance, who reported to Dick, the general manager of the division of 3,000 people. Our meeting had been scheduled for 30 minutes, but ended abruptly in 15. We didn’t get what we wanted. In spite of my confidence, something had gone terribly wrong, and I didn’t know what it was, or why it happened.

With the clarity of 20/20 hindsight and years of research, I now see what went wrong at that meeting. First of all, I presumed that this meeting was all about me, and a big deal in Dick Anderson’s day. After all, I was a manager, and what could be more important than my quality training program? Well, a whole lot, actually. Although huge for me, my presentation was only a small part of Dick’s complicated schedule that day.

Dick Anderson had much bigger, more compelling concerns than me or my proposal. He had just made national business headlines. During the early 1980s, the Japanese were making inroads not only into the automotive industry, but also into the world of high-tech. Their attack on American commerce dominated the business and popular press. In this competitive environment, Dick had made the decision to buy Japanese-made computer components because of their proven higher quality. As Dick said at the time, “We want to build high quality computers, but how can we do that if the memory chips keep failing?”

This had created quite an uproar and brought him attention from HP corporate offices. His focus that day might have been on a few other things—perhaps an interview with Business Week in the next half-hour or possibly his upcoming meeting with the HP Board. Dick oversaw an entire division of HP. His interest in my little slice of the pie was, to say the least, limited. (See Dick’s reflections on our meeting in the summary of Part I, page 29 .)

Your presentation is vitally important to you, but remember the executives are processing information from 25 to 50 different parts of the company.

—Felicia Marcus

The biggest lesson I teach executives and students is that your worldview is pretty narrow. The people above you are dealing with a much larger context than you are, and if you want to get good quickly, you need to understand more than your little piece.

—Steve Blank

The second mistake I made was seeing Dick as a father figure who would give me a pat on the back for my brilliant training efforts. With a background in humanistic psychology, I had hoped we could create a bond through our mutual commitment to training and the human potential. After all, aren’t happy, fulfilled, even self-actualized employees good for business? Couldn’t our quality training programs create peak experiences for them? Surely Dick would want to work with me toward the lofty goal of enriching his employees’ work experiences.

Well, not exactly.

Yes, Dick had set aside a half hour in his demanding schedule for our meeting, but it was my responsibility to let him know why we were there and what we needed from him. It was up to Ilene and me to get that message across clearly and quickly, then get the hell out of his office. As soon as he became aware that we didn’t have our act together, the meeting was over. He knew enough to value his time even if we didn’t.

Since I made that ineffective presentation to Dick Anderson, the senior-meeting challenge is more treacherous than ever for mid-level managers. With growing pressure from issues like globalization and the speed of business on the Internet, performance demands on senior leadership increase daily. There’s no time for, “Hi Bob. How was your weekend? How’s the family?” Today’s demand is: “Let’s get right to it. I have another meeting in ten minutes.”

I walked into that meeting like a naïve schoolboy hoping to please his teacher, rather than an effective professional. I lacked the knowledge of HP’s overall objectives, or Dick’s objectives, or how my department could support those objectives. To put it mildly, I was clueless.

Summary

Our company has worked with thousands of mid-level managers and executives preparing them to “speak up.” I can assure you that what happened to me as I struggled to understand how to relate to senior leadership is not uncommon. If you enter corporate life without formal business training, as I did, you will learn these communication rules by trial and error, if at all. It doesn’t need to be that way. What follows is a road map, a compass, and a GPS to help guide you on your journey into that unknown territory called “the C-suite.” These are the tools that will help you be successful every time you “speak up” in your organization.

Now let’s learn more about the people sitting around that big table who are waiting for your opening line.