Cole Porter’s 1934 song, “Miss Otis Regrets,” a wry blues tale about a society lady indisposed to answer questions, had its modern variation last week during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on President Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court, Elena Kagan.

In the prior post, you read how thoroughly the president’s staff prepared Ms. Kagan for the hearings by subjecting her to Murder Boards, intense practice sessions in which tough questions were fired at her repeatedly and she gave her answers to those questions repeatedly. Apparently, part of the preparation also included not answering some questions.

Jon Stewart seized on this strategy in his coverage of the hearings on “The Daily Show;” first by setting it up:

            Perhaps this year will be Elena Kagan’s chance to demonstrate the proper manner in which to answer
            committee questions in a forthright, non-evasive, honest, judicially transparent way, so that we may,
            as a nation, finally have the Supreme Court confirmation conversation that we deserve.

Mr. Stewart then followed his lead-in with quick cuts of about half a dozen video sound bites from the hearing in which Ms. Kagan refused to comment or said that a comment would not be appropriate.

Linda Greenhouse also seized on the refusals in the New York Times. Ms. Greenhouse, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for her coverage of the Supreme Court and teaches at Yale Law School, wrote, “A hearing like this represents a lost opportunity for the public to actually learn something about how judges think about what the Constitution means.”

Because of the highly-polarized political aspects of such legal hearings, candidates for the Supreme Court can invoke caution or appropriateness in not answering; because of the public’s low expectations of integrity in the political world, politicians often get away with ducking tough questions.

You do not have that option. In business, you must answer every question asked of you.

No ifs, ands, or buts.

The Senate Judiciary Committee begins hearings today on President Obama’s second nominee for the Supreme Court, Elena Kagan. Just as the first nominee, Sonia Sotomayor, and both of President George W. Bush’s nominees, John G. Roberts and Samuel Alito, and all the previous nominees of all the previous presidents, Ms. Kagan will be grilled mercilessly by the senators, particularly those of the opposition. All’s fair in politics and the party out of power wants to do everything it can to make the sitting president—and that president’s choices—look bad.

In preparation for the grilling, Ms. Kagan spent long hours in mock sessions called “Murder Boards.” This intense practice process, which includes everything from re-creating the setting in the senate chamber to anticipating the worst case questions from the senators, was described in a post on realclearpolitics.com by Julie Hirschfeld Davis. One particular item in the article that deserves your attention comes from Rachel Brand, an attorney who helped prepare Justices Roberts and Alito for their confirmation hearings. Ms. Brand said that the purpose of the Murder Boards “is to ask those hard questions in the nastiest conceivable way, over and over and over.”

The triple iteration of “over” is the operative point. Readers of this blog are familiar with Verbalization, the process of rehearsing your presentation aloud as you would to an actual audience; that same practice is just as, if not more important, in handling tough questions. It may seem sufficient to list the anticipated challenging questions and to craft an answer for each of them, but that is not enough. It is far more effective to have someone fire those questions at you, and to speak your answers aloud. And you must do it over and over and over. The dynamics of the repeated interchanges in practice will make your responses in real time crisp and assertive.

The CEO of a Silicon Valley company who had taken the Power Presentations program in preparation for his IPO road show, decided to prepare for his subsequent quarterly analysts’ call by writing the anticipated tough questions on flash cards and to Verbalize his answer to each card. To his dismay, during the actual call, he found his responses halting. He called me for a brush-up, and I told him that the flash cards were not a substitute for having a human voice—even in mock practice—fire the questions.

The Murder Boards for Ms. Kagan did it right. According to the article, the questions fired at her came from “About 20 members of President Barack Obama’s team…Kagan’s pals from academia as well as White House and Justice Department lawyers.” They made the mock practice more real.

In preparation for your next Q&A session, have a member or members of your team fire tough questions at you and Verbalize your answers to them over and over and over.

Think of it as volleying to perfect your tennis game.

In the previous post you read about how Richard Blumenthal, the attorney general of Connecticut, who is running for Christopher Dodd’s Democratic seat in the Senate and Rand Paul, the winner of the Republican Senatorial Primary in Kentucky, both had to walk back on controversial statements they had made. In politics, this is known as “spin,” or “putting lipstick on a pig.”

The most egregious example of political spin I have ever seen arrived in my mailbox via an email blast that indicated that it had been forwarded many times. If you receive as many such missives as I do, you are probably as dubious of its validity as I am. The story is very likely apocryphal, but I am taking the liberty of sharing the text with you to demonstrate just how far—and how creative—politicians will go to alter facts. (I have edited the names from the original email to avoid outing the alleged perpetrator of the spin.)

The email described a professional genealogy researcher who came across historic evidence that a distant relative of a sitting member of the U.S. Senate was a horse thief and train robber during the latter part of the 19th Century. The man was arrested, sent to jail, and then escaped, but was ultimately caught and hanged. The researcher wrote to the senator inquiring about his relative. The senator’s office staff replied:

He was a famous cowboy. His business empire grew to include acquisition of valuable equestrian assets and intimate dealings with the railroad. Beginning in 1883, he devoted several years of his life to government service, finally taking leave to resume his dealings with the railroad. In 1887, he was a key player in a vital investigation run by the renowned Pinkerton Detective Agency. In 1889 passed away during an important civic function held in his honor when the platform upon which he was standing collapsed.

Now, that is a shade of lipstick that would make Revlon blush.

Last week, Richard Blumenthal, the attorney general of Connecticut, who is running for Christopher Dodd’s Democratic seat in the Senate and Rand Paul, the winner of the Republican Senatorial Primary in Kentucky, found themselves having to explain controversial statements they had made in public: Mr. Blumenthal on the subject of whether or not he had seen active duty in Vietnam, and Mr. Paul on whether or not he would support the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Each man’s original statement raised a firestorm in the media and on the web and each man had to make new statements to clarify his position.

In politics, this backtracking is known as “spin,” and when the spin does not cover the original tracks, even the spinners’ supporters look unkindly on the tactic.

• Democratic National Committee Chairman Tim Kaine, appearing on ABC’s This Week, said of Mr. Blumenthal’s controversy, “Those statements were wrong, period. They were wrong and it was very important for him to acknowledge that and clear that up.”

• The New York Times’ Republican columnist characterized Mr. Paul’s explanation as “conspicuously avoiding saying that he would have voted for the bill that outlawed segregation. By the weekend (and under duress), he finally said it. But the tap-dancing route he took to get there was offensive, tone deaf and politically crazy.”

As we the people have so painfully come to expect, spin does not clarify; at best, it digresses, at worst, it obfuscates. In the business world, spin is not an option. But in politics, it happens so often that we have come to tolerate it.

In next week’s post, you’ll read the most egregious example of political spin I have ever seen.

Q&A: How to Handle Tough Questions
This all-day workshop is based on Jerry Weissman’s book and DVD, In the Line of Fire: How to Handle Tough Questions.

Monday, June 14, 2010
9:00AM to 5:00PM
San Francisco Airport Marriott
1800 Old Bayshore Highway
Burlingame, CA 94010

Please visit our Workshop page for more information and registration details.

Congratulations to the New Orleans Saints on their Super Bowl victory and to Marques Colston, their talented wide receiver. Mr. Colston, who was the Saints’ leading receiver in the game with 7 receptions for 83 yards, is a four-year veteran who helped his team reach the Super Bowl with 70 catches for 1,074 yards over the season.

What makes for a successful wide receiver is a statistic called “Yards After Catch,” or its acronym, “YAC.” It refers to a play in which a receiver catches a pass for a gain of yards and then runs for additional yards. Superior receivers, like Mr. Colston, strive for long YACs. In the 2009 season, his YAC record was 285, a 26.5% increment to his total. The not-so-superior receivers, in their desire to become superior receivers, often take their eyes off the ball and start to run before they catch the ball. They then fail to make the yards or the catch. The play fails.

The analogy to Q&A sessions applies here. All too often, presenters, in their desire to succeed, start to provide an answer before they fully understand the question. If the answer doesn’t match the question, the answer—as well as the entire presentation—fails. The missing link in this equation is listening, a social skill that is rapidly becoming extinct in the 21^st Century.

Listening was the subject of a prior blog; but for now, let’s cut to the chase: Always listen before you answer. Do not take a single step into your answer until your hands are clutching the ball, until you fully grasp the true meaning of the question.

In the next blog, we’ll look at another reason behind the success of the New Orleans Saints, and its relevance to presentations.

“Brevity is the soul of wit,” said Polonius, the sage royal advisor in Hamlet, in response to the king’s request for his opinion. William Shakespeare had his 17^th Century character use “wit” to mean intelligence rather than its current usage to mean clever humor. But just as the definition of wit has shifted over time, so has the definition of brevity. There are far too many presentations—and even more conversations—that go on and on and on, warranting the impatient accusation, “Tell me the time, not how to build a clock!”

In presentations, nowhere is verbosity more frequently perpetrated than in answers to questions. All too often, presenters introduce new material in their answers or rehash their original material ad nauseam. They fail to understand that the primary purpose of opening the floor to questions is to clarify the content in the presentation. Audiences are less interested in comprehensive and exhaustive responses to their questions than they are in seeing how a presenter handles him or herself in the line of fire.

In a prior blog, you read how New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a billionaire businessman and politician with a reputation for verbosity, found himself in an unexpectedly close race for re-election. As a result, in the homestretch of the campaign, he kept his replies to reporters’ questions very short.

Brevity is even more important in business than in politics. We have become accustomed to—and even reluctantly tolerant of—politicians who go into windbag mode, but we never cut anyone such slack in business; particularly in Q&A. As evidence, let me repeat a passage from the Bloomberg blog that states the case perfectly:

                  David Bellet, the Founder of Crown Advisors International, one of Wall Street’s most successful
                  investment firms, often made challenging questions a standard part of his due diligence of
                  new companies. ‘When I ask questions,’ said David, ‘I don’t really have to have the full answer
                  because I can’t know the subject as well as the presenter. What I look for is whether the presenter
                  has thought about the question, been candid, thorough, and direct and how the presenter handles
                  himself or herself under stress.’

Follow David Bellet’s advice; make your answers to your audience’s questions brief. When someone asks you the time, just tell them the time. In point of fact, make your presentations brief, too. In further point of fact, make your conversations brief. Conversation is a form of communication, only less formal than presentations. The social windbag is as much of a bore as the political windbag.

Leave the clock making to Bulova.

In his first television interview since his arrest last February for assaulting his former girlfriend, Rihanna, pop star Chris Brown told Larry King that he didn’t remember abusing her and that he is still shocked that the incident happened.

When King asked Brown about his reactions upon seeing police reports, Brown replied, “I — I don’t — like, I’ll just look at it and like, wow, like, I’m in shock. Because, first of all, that’s not who I am as a person and that’s not who I promise I want to be. And so I — I just — when I look at like the police reports or I hear about the police reports, I don’t know — I don’t know what — what to think. I just don’t know what to think. I’m just like, wow.”

King asked, “Do you remember doing it?”

Brown replied, “No.”

“You don’t remember doing it?” King asked again.

“I don’t — I don’t — it’s like — it’s crazy to me. Like, I was just — I’m like, wow. When I look at it now, it’s just like, wow, like, I can’t — I can’t believe that — that actually happened.” Brown said.

Chris Brown dodged Larry King’s questions by saying he did not remember. His responses showed no acknowledgement of wrong-doing.

William Routher of examiner.com responded to the interview in his article, Chris Brown and the Strategy of Denial, “In the cases of Chris Brown and Mel Gibson, there’s no indication given that they learned anything, except that they’d better say something quick or their career will be over. And what they say is, ‘That’s not me. I don’t know who that was, but it wasn’t me.’ If there’s no self-reflection, no admission of responsibility, no self-knowledge in someone’s apology, what’s it worth? Nothing. My question is, ‘What’s so hard about just admitting to the truth? Everybody already knows it.’”

Routher further recommended that Brown could’ve made the following statement instead, “I obviously have a serious anger management problem. What I did to Rhianna was unforgivable, out of control, cowardly and not worthy of anyone who calls himself a man. This incident has shown me that I need to take this problem very seriously, and now I am. I’m getting professional counseling and praying about it. I ask everyone to please forgive me. I have resolved never to allow myself to do anything like this again. I deeply apologize to Rhianna, all women and all my fans.”

In the comments following Routher’s article, his readers supported his recommendation. The statement would satisfy viewers of the interview by providing an acknowledgement of fault and a call to action. Lack of recollection is not an excuse to avoid answering a question.

It has become more and more common for celebrities and politicians to dodge tough questions by claiming poor memory. It didn’t quite work for Alberto Gonzales. In April 2007, during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing investigating the firing of federal prosecutors, the former Attorney General invoked the phrase, “I don’t recall,” 64 times, according to the Washington Post. Four months later, Gonzales resigned his position.

That same tactic in the business world, will quite likely lead to equally undesirable results. “I don’t remember” will not help your company raise financing, sell a product, or win a customer.

When you are guilty as charged by a tough question in business, honesty is the best policy. Adopt William Routher’s advice. Take responsibility for your actions; and once you’ve done that, go on to end on an upbeat note by saying that you have also taken action to make amends and correct the issue.

When you don’t know the answer to a question, just say you don’t know—as simple as that.

It’s perfectly permissible to admit that you are not the repository of every minute fact known to humankind. No one expects you to be a walking encyclopedia. But also say that you’ll find the answer and get it to your questioner.

If only President Obama had followed this advice in this most recent press conference. You read about his control—and loss of control—of his “ums” and “ahs” in that event in two separate posts last week, but I let the dust settle on the storm that followed regarding what has become known as “Henry Louis Gates-gate” before commenting on Obama’s Q&A handling techniques.

In the session, he fielded nine questions about his health care proposals and then called on Lynn Sweet, the Washington Bureau Chief for his hometown newspaper, the Chicago Sun-Times, who asked, “Recently Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. was arrested at his home in Cambridge. What does that incident say to you and what does it say about race relations in America?”

Obama replied, “Well, I should say at the outset that ‘Skip’ Gates is a friend, so I may be a little biased here. I don’t know all the facts.”

This was where he should have stopped—but didn’t. He went on for another 164 words recounting the salient facts of the case, and then said, “Now, I don’t know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts…”

This was another stopping point—but Obama didn’t. He continued, “…what role race played in that, but I think it’s fair to say…”

On The Daily Show playback of this moment, Jon Stewart froze the video tape, came out of his seat, stretched both arms out to the camera and, in a desperate rush of words, said what Obama should have said, “…that’s it’s a complicated issue and I don’t really have any comments at this time because I wasn’t there and I don’t have all the facts.”

But instead Obama went on to say, “…number one, any of us would be pretty angry; number two, that the Cambridge Police acted stupidly…”

Jon Stewart froze the videotape again, threw his hands up in the air, fell backwards, shouting a word that the show’s censors beeped out. Stewart then fell forward, his head in his arms, sobbing, “I couldn’t save, him! I couldn’t save him!”

Stewart’s comedic treatment of the moment came from a position of support for the president. But even one of Obama’s constant critics saw the same turning point. Shelby Steele, a research fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution, and the author of a 2007 book called, A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win, wrote an article about “Gates-gate” in the Wall Street Journal in which he said, “I saw Mr. Obama—with every escape route available to him—wade right into the Gates affair at the end of his health-care news conference.”

Jon Stewart and Shelby Steele, opposite ends of the political spectrum, saw the same escape route for Obama that is also open to you: If you don’t have all the facts, or the answer to any question, just say you don’t know—and stop right there.

Sooner or later every human being on the face of this planet is confronted with tough questions. One of the toughest and most common is the infamous loaded question, “When did you stop beating your wife?” which implies that you have indeed been beating your wife. How do you answer without agreeing with the implication? How do you not answer without appearing evasive?

Courtroom dramas often include a scene where an antagonistic prosecutor points his finger at a defendant and asks accusatorially, “Why did you kill your partner?” implying that the person—who has pleaded not guilty—did kill the partner. Or “What did you do with the gun?” implying that the person did possess the murder weapon.

This is known as a false assumption and there is only one way to handle such a question: Just apply the noted anti-drug slogan, and say, “No.” The defendant should say, “I did not kill my partner.” The business person should deny the false assumption. And if anyone ever asks you when you stopped beating your wife, simply rebut the fallacy by saying, “I never started.”

In Barack Obama’s first press conference last February, less than a month after he took office, three of the thirteen questions asked of him by the reporters were false assumptions. At the time, I wrote a blog about how Obama handled those questions and several other presentation factors but, given the storm of extreme charges, counter-charges, and accusations that continue to be fired back and forth between contending parties in the political—and business—arena, a revisit of Obama’s responses to those three questions is in order.

The first was from Associated Press reporter, Jennifer Loven, who referred to Obama’s statement earlier that same day that the economic crisis might be irreversible, and then asked him, “Do you think that you risk losing some credibility or even talking down the economy by using dire language like that?”

Obama’s first four words were, “No, no, no, no.”

Caren Bohan of Reuters then asked, “Did you underestimate how hard it would be to change the way Washington worked?”

The president replied, “I don’t think I underestimated it. I don’t think the American people underestimated it.”

Chip Reid of CBS News asked the third false assumption question, “You talked about that if your plan works the way you want it to work, it’s going to increase consumer spending. But isn’t consumer spending, or over-spending, how we got into this mess? And if people get money back into their pockets, do you not want them saving it or paying down debt first, before they start spending money into the economy?”

Obama said “no” again. “Well, first of all, I don’t think it’s accurate to say that consumer spending got us into this mess. What got us into this mess initially were banks taking exorbitant, wild risks with other people’s monies, based on shaky assets.”

In each case, Obama demonstrated his trademark cool demeanor, lightly contradicting his interrogator, and then moving on to correct the fallacy by stating his own position on the given issue.

You will not be surprised to know that Ms. Loven, Ms. Bohan, and Mr. Reid and their colleagues, being inveterate journalists, did not fold up their tents and steal away into the night, never again to ask a another false assumption question. It is their responsibility to challenge whoever holds the office of Commander-in-Chief. Conflict makes drama, and tough questions make good sound bites. In Obama’s subsequent press conferences, the White House press corps continued to challenge him; in fact, in each succeeding session, they turned up the heat.

In the next post you’ll see how Obama handled some tough questions in his most recent press conference.