In the Line of Fire: How to Handle Tough Questions -- When It Counts

Answer even the toughest, most hostile questions brilliantly: take the floor, stay poised, and win your audience over every time! Imagine: you’re standing in front of an audience and you've just been asked the question you'd been dreading — or, worse, you've been blindsided with a brutal question you never expected. What to do? Jerry Weissman has made a career of preparing executives for that moment. He's coached nearly 500 executives on their IPO road shows, the most critical presentations of their lives. Weissman’s In the Line of Fire has established itself as the world’s definitive guide to answering brutally tough questions in public — and now, he’s completely updated this classic with new examples, case studies, and even more great advice. Using compelling, up-to-the-minute examples from Wall Street, Washington, D.C., and beyond, Weissman teaches how to respond with perfect assurance, no matter what. You’ll discover how to avoid the defensive, evasive, or contentious answers that have destroyed political careers and can ruin your credibility. Weissman shows you how to control your entire exchange with a hostile questioner: the question, answer, interactions with questioner and audience, timing, and above all, yourself. Whether you're an executive, politician, fundraiser, interviewee, teacher, student — or even a family member at Thanksgiving dinner — you're judged on how you handle these moments. Get this book: handle them brilliantly.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Universal Challenges, Universal Solutions     Chapter 1: Agility versus Force    Chapter 2: The Critical Dynamics of Q&A    Chapter 3: Effective Management Implemented     Chapter 4: You’re Not Listening!     Chapter 5: Active Listening     Chapter 6: Retake the Floor      Chapter 7: Provide the Answer     Chapter 8: Topspin in Action     Chapter 9: Preparation     Chapter 10: The Art of War     Chpater 11: Lessons Not Learned     Chapter 12: The Role Model     Endnotes     Acknowledgments     Index    

About the Author :
Jerry Weissman, the world’s #1 corporate presentations coach, founded and leads Power Presentations, Ltd. in Burlingame, California. His private clients include executives at hundreds of the world’s top companies including Intel, IBM, Microsoft, and Cisco Systems. Weissman coached Cisco’s executives before their immensely successful IPO roadshow; afterward, the firm’s chairman attributed at least two to three dollars of Cisco’s offering price to his work. Since then, he has coached the IPO road shows for nearly 600 companies, helping them raise hundreds of billions of dollars. Among them were Yahoo!, Intuit, Dolby Laboratories, eBay, and most recently Trulia, the real estate search engine company, whose shares jumped more than 40 percent during its first day of trading.   Weissman is author of the global best-selling Presenting to Win: The Art of Telling Your Story; The Power Presenter: Technique, Style, and Strategy; Presentations in Action: 80 Memorable Presentation Lessons from the Masters; and Winning Strategies for Power Presentations (all published by FT Press/Pearson Education).