Life Lessons

Part of Rambler's job is booking people to speak or be interviewed. Having landed a fairly prominent executive, I wanted to get someone good to conduct the interview, someone who is very familiar with the executive and his company rather than just have the interview conducted by our in-house leader who sometimes doesn't exactly ask probing or challenging questions that our audience would like to hear.

I orchestrated a decent approach to try to put my subversive plan for good content into play, suggesting to our leader that the executive had proposed having this outsider do the interview. I knew the odds were long, our leader likes to be out front and said executive is prominent in the business to which we cater. Still I thought I'd had a pretty good shot.

Rejected!

My leader said she would like to conduct the interview because her doing it is important from a (not making this up) content branding perspective.

Huh?

I'm just trying to put together a compelling, or at least not totally boring, event. One way to do that is to have good interviewers. That, to me, is how one builds a brand.

But, as a colleague pointed out, this is a reminder that "the point isn't what's best for the organization...the point is what's best for the people who run it."