That's it. No more questions. Mr. Walker will not be taking any more questions now. How often have you seen something like that? television, movies, pop culture, unfortunately, it actually influences what people try to do in real life, and it just doesn't work. Now, it's one thing, if you've taken a few minutes away, because you're battling the fire, and you've got the hose, and you got to go back to rescuing people, there may be times during a crisis, where you do have to tell reporters, I'll come back to you but right now I've got to focus on this.
But in many, many situations, the crisis already happened or it's a white collar crime. It's not something that requires instant physical attention from the spokesperson or the CEO. And when you tell the reporters we're not taking any questions, or no more questions, or you only have 10 minutes, what you're telling them is hey, we got something to hide. 10 of the bad guys here, we think if we run off the stage, no one will notice. Guess what? You're not fooling anyone.
My advice during a crisis, something that really goes to the reputation of your organization, you need to do the opposite. You need to tell reporters, I not leaving until every single question has been answered. You need to act like nuts. You're enjoying this. Nobody expects you to enjoy a crisis. But that there's no place you'd rather be than trying to explain to the world what happened, what you're trying to do to make things better.
What you're doing to make sure this will never happen again, safeguards you're putting in place. sympathies that you're extending, how you're helping anyone who has been harmed. These are such incredibly important messages. And while you're not happy about what happened, you're proud of The response your organization has come up with, you're proud of the fact that you have a plan to deal with problems and you're doing everything you can. That needs to be your attitude. And if you act like you're somehow doing a reporter a favor by taking another question, big, big problem.
Reporters are gonna sense that you're hiding something sense that there's something wrong here. And it's going to make them want to dig deeper. You leave the lectern, you leave the press conference room. Well, now they can go fish around, talk to anyone else. Talk to perhaps a disgruntled employee to talk about where you've cut corners in the past. Now, they still might do that.
But the more you can talk to them, the more they feel like we're dealing with the person who knows the most who's being transparent, the better. It helps you and helps the reporter helps the public to know in some situations this has been a very specific strategy by some famous politicians in the United States. john mccain, former presidential candidate and longtime United States Senator was caught in a scandal. A savings and loan scandal many decades ago, publicly admitted he was wrong apologized. It was a scandal that destroyed many other politicians careers. But the way he handled it is he held press conference after press conference he met with all the reporters in his state, every single media market, talked about it talked about it talked about it basically followed reporters out to their car to continue talking about it got to the point where reporters like enough already when they want to hear about it anymore.
He's satisfied that he satiated their desire for information about it. Consequently, I basically never talked About to get he put the scandal at rest. It did not destroy his career, it didn't harm. His aspirations of getting the nomination for the presidency from his own party didn't hurt him from reelection. Let that be a lesson for you. He did something wrong.
And the crisis is because of something you did even more reason to not artificially tell people. You can't talk about it or don't ask those questions or only so much time. Talk about it, get it all out, exercise these demons get it out there. Short term, it's not comfortable, short term, there's more pain, but long term, a lot less pain. And it can eliminate this particular crisis, from the ability of destroying your whole reputation long term.