Evasion in Action

Mike Lazaridis, the CEO of RIM, whose contentiousness in a BBC interview you read about in Chapter Two, made another attempt at reviving the declining fortunes of BlackBerry. He appeared at All Things Digital, a high-profile conference run by the Wall Street Journal’s chief technology writer Walt Mossberg and his partner Kara Swisher. When the two reporters sat down for an interview with Lazaridis, Mossberg asked him:

There’s a widespread tangible feeling that you’ve fallen behind.…So something has happened in the last couple of years to your iconic leadership position, or do you—do you disagree?

Lazaridis promptly did:

You know, I have to disagree with that and—and the thing is, the way I look at it is, you know, we’re running a business. We’re providing value to our customers. We built—um—you know, we, arguably, we invented the smartphone. At least the, the—the real push messaging smartphone that’s out there today. Um—we never stopped innovating. We never stopped investing in the R&D, and we decided to go global with our technology. To do that, we targeted the network technology that was available.

Mossberg interjected:

Did it mean you were chaining yourself to the lowest common denominator then? Is that—was that a cost of that approach?

Again, Lazaridis disagreed:

I would argue that what we decided was, we needed to get to multi-core processing because what we realized was these things are, these devices are using a lot of power. And, as we start getting into the high gigahertz problem that we have with laptops, we realized that what we needed to do was to run multiple cores at lower speeds. You know that’s very technical, but you know this has been what has made us successful all along.

Mossberg let Lazaridis go on a bit longer and then said:

I don’t know what those mean, but I am sure they are very good.⁵

After the interview, Swisher wrote in her blog:

He did not quite answer our questions about why RIM’s flagship BlackBerry seems to have missed a step in the highly competitive smartphone wars compared to its new and more innovative rivals, Apple’s iPhone and Google Android.⁶

Swisher’s opinion was seconded in an article by the Washington Post’s technology journalist Rob Pegoraro:

Seriously, does RIM not realize whom it’s competing with? The company is all but begging to get crushed by Apple. Serving up word-salad answers or bailing out of TV interviews won’t stave off that fate.⁷

Mossberg, Swisher, and Pegoraro did not let their subject get away with evasive answers.

Nor did Betty Quick, the co-anchor of CNBC’s business program Squawk Box. In an interview with Brad Irwin, the U.S. president of Cadbury, the British confectionery company, she asked:

We’ve been talking about cocoa prices for one, how that’s a market where you’ve seen some huge price increases. We’ve been wondering how that’s been affecting you? Cocoa prices, but also other commodities. What’s that mean for Cadbury’s bottom line?

Irwin replied:

Well, we’re—ah—full steam ahead on our business right now and—ah—things are going quite well, so—ah—we’re optimistic about the future.

When interviewees reply to a question about threats as Irwin did by spinning off to a vague positive statement, journalists view it as a “Pollyanna” ploy. They sarcastically characterize the deflection with the words that police use when they chase gawkers away from crime scenes: “Nothing to see here, move right along.”

Quick immediately saw through Irwin’s ploy and pressed him for a direct answer:

But what about commodity prices? They are increasing. How do you deal with some of those higher prices?

In response to a question about cocoa prices, Irwin diverted to chewing gum:

Well, we—ah—as you say, one of the things we do is we innovate our products to improve them and offer better value and one of the products we have now is—ah—Trident Extra Care.

The television screen cut away from Irwin to an animated chart of cocoa prices rising, while Quick pressed her case:

Like what things? If cocoa prices increase by, let’s say by 75% over the course of the year, how do you improve your margins when you’re dealing with those costs?

Irwin retreated to the business equivalent of another ploy politicians use—“No comment”:

Well, I can’t speculate on what, you know, cocoa prices may or may not do in the future.

Quick promptly countered with evidence:

Well, that’s what they have done over the last year. So how do you deal with that?

Irwin went back to his Pollyanna ploy:

Well—the—ah—you know—what we try to do is to innovate our products, offer new products with better value—um—and continue to grow our business…

Quick’s Squawk Box co-anchor Joe Kernen, who had been listening to the exchange, could be silent no longer:

Just offer great products at reasonable prices that taste really good, Brad? Don’t have any comments on anything happening in the industry at large? Can we ask you about competitors, is that a fair question, or we won’t get an answer there either? ⁸

Like all their media colleagues, Quick and Kernan pursue their prey with bloodhound tenacity.

Sometimes, however, journalists are outperformed by legislators. In a congressional hearing, U.S. Representative Katie Porter (D–CA) deployed her extensive experience as a litigator to try to get Dr. Robert Redfield, the director of the CDC at the time, to answer a straightforward question:

Dr. Redfield, will you commit to the CDC, right now, using that existing authority to pay for diagnostic testing free to every American, regardless of insurance?

Rather than answer “yes” or “no,” Redfield replied:

Well, I can say, we’re going to do everything we can to make sure everybody can get the care they need.

Unsatisfied, Porter insisted:

Nope, not good enough. Reclaiming my time. Dr. Redfield, you have the existing authority. Will you commit, right now, to using the authority you have, vested in you under law that provides in a public health emergency for testing, treatment, exam isolation without cost, yes or no?

Again, avoiding a “yes” or “no,” Redfield offered:

What I’m going to say is, I’m going to review it in detail with the CDC and the department.

Porter persisted adamantly:

No, reclaiming my time. Dr. Redfield, respectfully, I wrote you this letter with my colleagues Rosa de Laura and Lauren Underwood, Congressman Underwood and Congressman de Laura. We wrote you this letter one week ago, we quoted that existing authority to you, and we laid out this problem. We asked for a response yesterday. The deadline and the time for delay has passed. Will you commit to involving your existing authority under 42 CFR 70 1.30 to provide for coronavirus testing for every American, regardless of insurance coverage?

Bureaucrats often divert from “yes” or “no” answers to the “We’ll study it” ploy. Having first stated it as “I’m going to review it,” Redfield diverted again, this time with different wording:

What I was trying to say is that the CDC is working with HHS now to see how we operationalize that.

“Operationalize” is technically a word in the dictionary, but in the view of William Safire, the former presidential speechwriter you read about in Chapter Four, it is “bad style.” In one of his best pieces in his brilliant “On Language” column for the New York Times, Safire called the style “verbification…turning nouns, adjectives and the like into verbs.”⁹ “Operational” is an adjective; “operationalize” is a verb. Safire would probably have preferred Redfield to say, “make diagnostic testing operational.”

“Verbification” is clearly synonymous with “bureaucratese,” and Porter would have none of Redfield’s “operationalizing”:

Dr. Redfield, I hope that that answer weighs heavily on you. Because it is going to weigh very heavily on me and on every American family.

Redfield stayed with his new word:

Our intent is to make sure every American gets the care and treatment they need at this time of this major epidemic and I’m currently working with HHS to see how to best operationalize it.

Ever so politely, the determined legislator dismissed the good doctor’s new word:

Dr. Redfield, you don’t need to do any work to operationalize it. You need to make a commitment to the American people, so they come in to get tested. You can operationalize the payment structure tomorrow.

Finally relenting to Porter’s perseverance, Redfield said:

I think you’re an excellent questioner, so my answer is yes.¹⁰

Porter’s persuasive turnabout was a rare event in Washington. Most legislators, despite their resolve, cannot get answers from witnesses whose testimonies are carefully schooled to slip and slide by spin doctors.

Roger Goodell, the Commissioner of the National Football League was evidently well-schooled for his answer to a question by U.S. Representative Maxine Waters (D–CA) during a hearing at the House Judiciary Committee investigating brain injuries in professional football.:

I want to know, what are you doing in the negotiations that are going on now to deal with this problem and other problems related to the injuries that football players obtain, and its impact on their health later on?

The Key Word in the congresswoman’s question was “now,” the Universal Issue of time, but Goodell answered in the future tense:

Well, again, we’re at the very early stages of negotiations, but I believe that we will be addressing these matters in a responsible fashion that we’ll be able to come back before you in some point in time and say that we have addressed these in a way that’s responsible.¹¹

You cannot shift tenses, you cannot “verbify,” defer to studies, have no comment, use the Pollyanna ploy, move right along, or deliver a word-salad to evade answering your audience as Tweedledee did to Alice.

Instead, follow the advice of my earlier paraphrase of the famous line from the film Field of Dreams: “If they ask it, you must answer it.” As true as that was in Chapter Nine for seemingly irrelevant questions, it is even more so for relevant questions. Every question asked of you requires an answer—unless you have a very good reason. You can decline to answer if you provide valid grounds for a set of specific circumstances:

Decline to Answer in Action

Nick Saban had a very good reason not to answer a question a sports reporter asked him. As the head coach of the University of Alabama’s football team, he is a man with an embarrassment of riches: his team has, for more than a decade, overwhelmed most of its opponents every season, and his star players regularly go on to superstardom in the National Football League. As every coach is required to do, Saban submits to a brief obligatory postgame interview on the field, but as every coach’s primary responsibility is to build teamwork, he is not required to answer questions that seek to stir up controversy.

After one game in which he played two excellent quarterbacks, a reporter asked Saban:

Alright coach, everyone had questions about who was going to start at quarterback when this game started. What answers did you have about your quarterbacks after watching both of them play tonight?

Like every other coach, Saban began with the obligatory anodyne sportsmanship answer:

I still like both guys. I think both guys are good players. I think both guys could help our team.

But then he decided that question had crossed a sensitive line:

So why do you continually try to get me to say something that doesn’t respect one of them? I’m not going to, so quit asking! ¹²

Other than these specific circumstances, no matter how challenging the questions are, you must provide direct answers. Be guided by the Latin phrase quid pro quo, meaning “what for what” or “something for something,” the subject of the next chapter.