A CEO explains why he never talks about his product in interviews, only the people who make it. His mentor Bob Chapman taught him that people are the real product, a philosophy that sets him apart from typical media-trained executives focused on machinery and metrics.
Chapters
In general, CEOs are the worst guests because it's hard to have candid conversations with them. They're very, very media trained. They come in with their talking points. It doesn't matter what I ask. They know how to get their point across. They're going to tell me about their success. They're going to tell me about their product. They're going to tell me about the quality. I mean, I'm sitting here in one of your factories and not once have we talked about your product, what this factory makes, the quality that you're outperforming the market. And this is completely opposite than almost every other CEO I talked to.
Well, Simon, it was a couple of years ago that Washington University organizational development professors interviewed me for an hour and a half, normal interview. And at the end of an hour and a half, they said, we have never talked to a CEO that never talked about your product. And I sat back and I said, we've been talking about our product for the last hour and a half. It's our people. Okay. I'm not going to go to my grave proud of the machinery we built because we built great machinery. I'm going to go to my grave proud of the people that built that. It caught them completely off guard.
