Transatlantic Zeppelin: Maria comes to Columbia

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February 22, 2005

Maria comes to Columbia

Maria Bartiromo swung by Columbia after work today. I realized after hearing her speak for 90 minutes that Maria has probably taught me more about the markets, finance, investing, and corporations than anybody else, except maybe her colleagues Tyler Matheson, Ron Insana, David Faber, etc. I started watching Maria shortly after she came to CNBC, roughly in late 1993 when I was 13 and dashed home from middle school to watch the bell close, even though everything was way over my head. (In 2004, living in Europe, I dashed home from work at 10PM to do the same.) My first reaction is that it is really strange to hear in person a voice you've heard almost daily for the past decade.

I've never believed that TV anchors or actresses are as stupid as people (men) say. Maria is among the smartest and, accompanied by her husband, gave a similarly excellent lecture. The talk covered such topics as the current economy, the latest thinking in leadership, the emergence of China as a global buyer, Maria's "big break," and the extent to which Maria controls her editorial content. Beyond this, Maria speculated about possibly coming to Columbia to get an MBA, so I returned the compliment by asking her to come teach a course instead. (It would be 10X oversubscribed.) Maria does have a bit of a tendency to drop names, but if my job were interviewing CEOs and government leaders, I would probably drop names too.

In particular, I asked Maria to tell us how she extracts information from execs who may not want to give it out. In political communications courses, the spinmeisters advise us to go into interviews with three key talking points, from which one uses "bridge phrases" to go from answering the question to talking-up the talking points. Of course, one rarely actually answers confrontational questions but rather expands or narrows it. For example, if a host asks John Kerry what he thinks of good job-creation numbers, Kerry doesn't talk about the good numbers but rather the "bad economy" overall. I've always thought that Maria is particularly good at getting execs off their talking points. Although she asked to go off the record on the specifics, I can pass along a few of Maria's points:

Know your stuff. Nobody wants to engage you if you don't know what you're talking about.
Beware of creating "gotcha" moments. It was interesting to hear Maria talk about her admiration of Tim Russert's ability to ask a "gotcha" question without causing the subject to clam-up. Russert is very good at asking questions such as, "what should voters make of these statements?" Everybody has an agenda, and the interviewer's agenda should be to look out for the viewers' interest.
Spend part of the discussion talking about what the guest wants to talk about. An interview should be both business and pleasure.

Posted by adrianjo at February 22, 2005 08:48 PM