My Own Private Graduate School
Every now and then I submit myself to a hugely daunting assignment: Fashion an entertaining, literary 2,000-word narrative profile from one hour-long phone interview with the subject and whatever you can glean from the Internet. It’s a task verging on the absurd. How can you possibly make this work?
To be sure, it would be much easier if I could follow the person around and spend unlimited time with them and interview dozens of colleagues and friends. But this isn’t possible. The assignments come from a magazine for a top business school, and the alums I profile typically don’t have a hell of a lot of time to speak with me—nor much of a desire to allow me to reach out to their contacts. I catch snippets of time while they rush to the next appointment or graze their desks between meetings or while they’re boarding the next plane, engulfed in noise and commotion.
But I’m learning over the years that challenges breed creativity, and these exercises in the impossible have taught me some things that I might not otherwise have learned in the best conditions. Perhaps this is my unofficial journalism school. These assignments have forced me to become resourceful, to ask just the right question at the right moment and to determine and adapt to people’s interview styles as quickly as I possible can, working to ask the right questions at the right moment.
They’ve also, on a side note, allowed me the great opportunity to speak with remarkably interesting, successful people, from the deputy director of the FBI to the CEO of Siemens in the U.S. to the CEO of Timberland and the CEO of Brooks Sports. I am intensely grateful for the opportunity to absorb some of their wisdom and glimpse the views that make them exceptional.
Hopefully what I can come up with from these brief encounters proves entertaining and informative. Looking back, here is one feature profile I wrote on an extraordinary tech investor and a shorter one I wrote on the founder of PROBAR, a quickly growing energy bar company. I’m currently working on another to come out this winter. I can say with certainty that I did and do the best I possibly can with the challenge.