Negotiating an Interview with a Rock Star CEO

Elinor Mills' near-whimsical CNet story on her interview with Google boss Eric Schmidt reveals much about the games that go on when business journalists seek interviews with high-profile CEOs.

While it doesn't provide the same spectacular theater as the famed shut-down of Benjamin Cohen's interview of Apple's Phil Schiller, Mill's one-sided saga still illuminates five key factors that come into play when a journalist goes after 12 unsatisfying minutes with a CEO.

1. The Transactional Factor. The agreement between Mills and the Google flacks reflects the reality that most CEO interviews are now often conducted with pre-negotiated restrictions. The company wants to use the journalist to get out its messages, and the journalist wants to use the CEO's fame to impress editors and attract readers. The company is free to offer its conditions, and the journalist is free to accept or reject them. Unfortunately, most journalists know that if they reject the deal, one of their competitors will take it.

2. The Power Factor. Those negotiations, like any other kind of negotiation, are shaped largely by the relative power of the two parties.

CEO Power: While most of them are hardly charismatic, top-name CEOs are still essentially rock stars in the business news world. And as CEO of perhaps the highest-profile company on the planet these days, Schmidt comes to the table with uniquely huge negotiating leverage. That's because every reporter would love tell their editors they've got an interview with the Google boss.

Journalist Power: Journalists have power when they (a) write for one of the powerhouses, and (b) they already have enough good stuff to roll with a strong story. Nothing conjures sudden cooperativeness in a corporate flack faster than the sentence: "I'm with the Wall Street Journal, and my editors are running with this story one way or another.

3. The Oh-By-The-Way Factor. When reporters agree to restrictions that would seem to doom the interview to dullsville, they almost always do so in hopes that wheedling their way into a converstation with the CEO will then allow them to coax out a couple of decent quotes on the hotter issues. Beat reporters will tread lightly, fearing that blatant violation of the agreement will get them frozen out of future opportunties.

4. The CEO Skill Factor. Most media-savvy CEOs excel at finding graceful ways of not answering the out-of-bounds questions, usually by paraphrasing the company's established line on the issue, and then adding something like:

"Ah heck, Elinor, you know there's no way that I'm going to say anything about that right now. The Microsoft-Yahoo situation is obviously of great interest to everybody in the tech world, but I can't tip our hand just to make your story more interesting, heh, heh, heh. Besides, ol' (name of flack hovering nearby) would fire me, heh, heh, heh."

But oddly enough, the leaders of the grooviest of companies often behave like bunkered bureaucrats when cornered by a reporter who leans forward. After gamely indulging the mojo in a bad snapshot session, Schmidt then acted with the rigid, clay-footishness you might expect from a second-tier Halliburton executive, not the guy who runs the coolest place to work.

5. The Flack-on-a-Live-Grenade Factor. But Schmidt should never have been put in that spot to begin with. All good flacks know that Rule #1 is that you never let your principle look bad when you can interject and take the shrapnel yourself. The Google flacks should have been the bad guys, and not forced Schmidt himself to play the heavy.

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