Wal-Mart Executives To face Q&A With Media
Last updated Saturday, May 31, 2008 5:51 PM CDT in News
By Kimberly Morrison|
The Morning News
Sam Walton spoke off the cuff in the old days of Wal-Mart shareholders' meetings, and the event more resembled a Saturday morning meeting than the spectacle it is today.
"They actually had to try to shoehorn enough business issues to qualify as a shareholders' meeting," said Michael Bergdahl, who worked under Walton as director of people in the 1990s and has since authored two books on Wal-Mart culture.
Walton didn't much believe in orchestrating a big show for his humble little company, and he didn't want his executives spending much time on the stuff, either. They were to "stick to knitting and run the business," Bergdahl said.
Those days are long retired to Wal-Mart folklore.
The Bentonville-based retailer is more media savvy and is learning that being the world's largest retailer also makes it the biggest target.
So teleprompters have replaced winging it, and media training for executives has become part of the knitting.
"For them to take this step is probably a painful one, and it's not so much because they want to, it's because they have to. The world expects more openness and to hear about what they are doing," Bergdahl said.
And Wal-Mart may have a better story to tell than in recent years when it spent most of its media energy defending itself.
"Wal-Mart has a lot of positive things to talk about, so maybe this is a combination of pulling out of that negativity and extreme Wal-Mart sensitivity," said Carol Spieckerman, president of Bentonville-based retail consulting firm newmarketbuilders.
The retailer is for a second year trying to craft an image of openness at a question and answer session with the 100-plus media and eight executives - who are largely made unavailable to the media throughout the year - prior to the shareholders' meeting.
Control and preparation lurks behind the openness.
Bill Berman, head of executive assessment and coaching practices for Applied Psychological Techniques Inc., a Darien, Conn.-based team of industrial organizational psychologists with offices in Bentonville, said executive coaching and media training are in high demand. His company does work with Wal-Mart and a list of Fortune 500 companies, but Berman does not work directly with Wal-Mart nor would he comment on the work his company does with the retailer.
Berman explained the process of coaching executives and corporate public relations teams on effective communication with the media.
"The most important thing is reducing anxiety," Berman said. "The second thing is getting people to understand what the message is about.
"A lot of it is really preparing people - preparing them for the likely questions, thinking through their answers and how to handle provocative questions."
So how does an executive handle that tough question?
"You have a lot of options that people forget about. You can decline, reframe the question, you can end the interview, but probably the most important thing is to not be reactive," Berman said.
Sam Waltz isn't a psychiatrist like Berman, but he has also coached executives through media communication as a former director of public relations for DuPont Co.
"You teach them to handle the questions you don't want to answer and give them answers to the questions you really wanted to have asked," said Waltz, president of Sam Waltz & Associates, a Wilmington, Del.-based business and communications counseling company.
Waltz complimented Wal-Mart's strides to take stewardship of its own message.
"There are so many sources out there that, if they refuse to participate in the dialogue, they leave the debate up to detractors. So what you have here is Wal-Mart trying to create the dominant paradigm around its reputation. If Wal-Mart doesn't, someone else will," he said.
Retail watchers predict Wal-Mart will focus on its new positives, such as sustainability and health care.
"When your operations are experiencing difficulty, sometimes all you want to do is pull the covers over your head and go back to bed," said Patricia Edwards, a fund manager with San Francisco-based Wentworth, Hauser and Violich.
"When things are going better, it's a lot easier to be open. And now they have a cohesive message and a real story to tell as far as what's happening."
Reader Comments (No comments posted.)
The following comments are provided by readers and are the sole responsibility of their authors. The Morning News does not review comments before their publication, nor do we guarantee their accuracy. By publishing a comment here you agree to abide by our comment policy. If you see a comment that violates our policy, please notify the web editor.
Not already registered?
