Don’t be intimidated when talking to CEOs

Patricia Sheridan of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette interviewed Fox Business Network anchor Maria Bartiromo about how she does her job and why she left CNBC.

Here is an excerpt:

Q. Once you get the big elusive CEO interviews for your show, do you find they are reluctant to talk? Are they guarded because of what they do?

A. I think it goes back to understanding the content. If you understand the content and you’ve done your work, there is nothing difficult about anything. You may very well be able to have an even conversation with the other person because you are both talking the same language. If you are not prepared and don’t know the subject matter, you will be intimidated.

Q. You had a really good run at CNBC, so what was the main reason you decided to move on?

A. I think the main reason was I was there 20 years and I was looking at my career and thinking: ‘Do I want to do the same thing for another five years?’ They made a very nice offer to me to stay there. There was always a pressure for me to have, you know, four and five people on at once. There was always a pressure to do short interviews, 5 minutes, 6 minutes. I feel like sometimes these are complicated subjects, business and markets and economy, and you really can’t get it in six minutes.

Often you’ve got the producer just watching the clock and not necessarily listening to the interview. I’m listening and I know we haven’t really gotten what we wanted. So I have to keep talking with follow-ups. I did get frustrated by the short-termism. That was OK for the 1990s when the stock market was all the rage. You want to do short-term to see what stocks to buy, what stocks to sell. But now it is a very different time. People today want perspective. I think people are more informed about their money than ever before. They are not being served well by just getting a sound-bite.

Read more here.