Synopses & Reviews
Answer even the toughest, most hostile questions brilliantly: take the floor, stay poised, and win your audience over every time! Imagine: you’re standing in front of an audience and you've just been asked the question you'd been dreading — or, worse, you've been blindsided with a brutal question you never expected. What to do? Jerry Weissman has made a career of preparing executives for that moment. He's coached nearly 500 executives on their IPO road shows, the most critical presentations of their lives. Weissman’s In the Line of Fire has established itself as the world’s definitive guide to answering brutally tough questions in public — and now, he’s completely updated this classic with new examples, case studies, and even more great advice. Using compelling, up-to-the-minute examples from Wall Street, Washington, D.C., and beyond, Weissman teaches how to respond with perfect assurance, no matter what. You’ll discover how to avoid the defensive, evasive, or contentious answers that have destroyed political careers and can ruin your credibility. Weissman shows you how to control your entire exchange with a hostile questioner: the question, answer, interactions with questioner and audience, timing, and above all, yourself. Whether you're an executive, politician, fundraiser, interviewee, teacher, student — or even a family member at Thanksgiving dinner — you're judged on how you handle these moments. Get this book: handle them brilliantly.
About the Author
Jerry Weissman, the world’s #1 corporate presentations coach, founded and leads Power Presentations, Ltd. in Burlingame, California. His private clients include executives at hundreds of the world’s top companies including Intel, IBM, Microsoft, and Cisco Systems. Weissman coached Cisco’s executives before their immensely successful IPO roadshow; afterward, the firm’s chairman attributed at least two to three dollars of Cisco’s offering price to his work. Since then, he has coached the IPO road shows for nearly 600 companies, helping them raise hundreds of billions of dollars. Among them were Yahoo!, Intuit, Dolby Laboratories, eBay, and most recently Trulia, the real estate search engine company, whose shares jumped more than 40 percent during its first day of trading.
Weissman is author of the global best-selling Presenting to Win: The Art of Telling Your Story; The Power Presenter: Technique, Style, and Strategy; Presentations in Action: 80 Memorable Presentation Lessons from the Masters; and Winning Strategies for Power Presentations (all published by FT Press/Pearson Education).
Table of Contents
Introduction: Universal Challenges, Universal Solutions xv
Chapter 1: Agility versus Force 1
Chapter 2: The Critical Dynamics of Q&A 9
Chapter 3: Effective Management Implemented 21
Chapter 4: You’re Not Listening! 29
Chapter 5: Active Listening 43
Chapter 6: Retake the Floor 57
Chapter 7: Provide the Answer 87
Chapter 8: Topspin in Action 105
Chapter 9: Preparation 119
Chapter 10: The Art of War 137
Chpater 11: Lessons Not Learned 151
Chapter 12: The Role Model 165
Endnotes 177
Acknowledgments 187
Index 191
Jerry Weissman’s legendary guide to answering even the most brutally tough questions in public, and winning over any audience – now completely updated with new examples, case studies, and more!