In a roundabout way, I thought of this group when I heard this....
At an Executive Leadership program today I heard a highly placed state official presenting advice on dealing with the Legislature and other groups. He relayed the story of a misguided company representative who had gone before the Legislature to speak about an aviation fuel tax. The issue was actually simple and could have convincingly been stated in 2 sentences. Instead, he insisted on this long, drawn out 10 page presentation, and was rather obvious in his feelings of self-importance. Members of this very powerful committee do not like their time wasted so they proceeded toy with him, interrupting his presentations and arguing his points.
As he got more and more frustrated and angry, finally one of the committee members asked, "And what about the kids?" Of course, it had nothing to do with "kids" and everyone knew it. But the guy blustered on and accomplished nothing but becoming an example of how not to present your case.
The state official's advice (moral of the story)was: once they bring up "the kids" as an argument, there's no way to win. Just stop. He said, "in fact, just about any time I find myself on the losing side of an argument (about anything!), I just throw out 'and what about the kids?'"
Hopefully for us, this is more than simply a political strategy. Yet it remains the the most relevant question in our work and our decisions:
