We’re asked a lot about how to interact with senior executives – how do you make the elevator speech, for example. It’s not at all unusual for us to come in and make exactly the same points that an internal team is making to their executives, but the executives listen to our point of view, because we’re the outside experts.

In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & CEO Bryan Strawser and Senior Consultant Jennifer Otremba talk preparing for that executive conversation – the need to have the elevator speech ready, but more importantly – having the courage to have the conversation that you really need to have when that moment of truth arrives in your career.

In other words, I hope you dance. Don’t be the wallflower.

Episode Transcript

Bryan Strawser:                   My first one on one with the CEO at our former employer … so you walk in there, and there’s this expansive office and a beautiful view, and he was grumpy, which I think he was grumpy most of the time.

Jen Otremba:                        Fancy suit.

Bryan Strawser:                   Fancy suit, but anyway, we sit down and we do the nicety thing, and we’d known each other from some previous roles that I was in. But we get into this … we start the … I should say he started the discussion about the reason I was there, and his first question was, “I don’t really understand this business continuity crap, and I don’t understand why we need to invest money in it.” And I, to this day, don’t know if that was game or if that was for real, but at the moment, it felt pretty real.

Jen Otremba:                        There might be some realism in it.

Bryan Strawser:                   There might be some realism in it.

Jen Otremba:                        I mean-

Bryan Strawser:                   But he looks … and then he just looks at me. So here I am in the moment of truth, right? And we’ve talked … you hear about this situation all the time, the elevator speech, the coffee meeting where you have five minutes to talk about whatever. But this was real. This was real life. I had a grumpy CEO who basically just told me that one third of my job responsibilities he didn’t see any purpose in.

And I looked at him and said, “So, there was this labor strike, labor issues in the port in Asia that was on the front page of the Wall Street Journal yesterday.” He said, “Yes, I read that.” “I bet you didn’t know that our principal competitor, who also gets 80% of their product from Asia, just like we do, has an exclusive deal with that port that this labor strike didn’t interfere with the loading of their containers on ships.” “I didn’t know that.” “Well, wouldn’t you like to be in that situation instead of them?” “Well, goddamn right, I would.” “Well, we’re not, because we didn’t even know that.”

And then, I walked through here’s the continuity. Part of the continuity strategy is you’ve got to look upstream to your supply chain, and the ports are part of that, and blah, blah, blah, blah.

Jen Otremba:                        Yeah.

Bryan Strawser:                   And then, we got onto more friendly conversation from there, but I think it was an eye opening experience for me from the standpoint of the interaction, but I think it was an eye opening experience for him, because nobody had ever had this conversation with him before.

Jen Otremba:                        Yeah. So what we’re getting at here is we get a lot of questions at Bryghtpath about,