Sometimes it's not what you say, it's what you don't say

As a commentary on presentations, this blog centers on what presenters say and how they say it, but for many leaders the most important factor might be what they don't say.

It's unlikely, for example, that we'll find any evidence Rupert Murdoch or his editors ever gave explicit instructions to hack into voicemail accounts or do anything else unethical. But what they probably said was something like: "We expect you to get the story and if you can't do it we'll get someone who can."

Likewise, out of all the executives guilty of corporate malfeasance in recent years, none was ever heard telling someone to "cook the books." They didn't have to. In a 2005 mea culpa tour of college campuses that followed his imprisonment for wire fraud and money laundering, former WorldCom/MCI senior manager Walt Pavlo described the corporate climate that led to his crimes:

"MCI was a very aggressive company. There were very few parameters given on how you would operate. It was, 'Get the job done. Here are the numbers you're supposed to meet.' I walked in every day to a shareholder price [displayed] in the lobby. What am I going to do to make that better? What was missing was 'How are we going to make that goal?' I never really heard anybody talk about ethics. That leads to a lot of temptations and things that just happen when people are left to their own devices."

The consequences can be tragic when those devices are weapons. Responding to anti-war demonstrations at Kent State University in 1970, Governor James Rhodes held a news conference during which he called campus protestors the worst type of people in America and stated that every force of law would be used to deal with them. Reportedly the briefing he gave National Guard troops was even more incendiary. The next day, May 4, Guardsmen killed four students.