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When Nicolai Tangen, head of Norway’s $1.6tn oil fund, began interviewing chief executives for his new podcast in 2022, it was a approach to give the Norwegian folks a glimpse into the massive worldwide firms their nation was investing in.
His roughly 45-minute weekly episodes, which have featured high bosses from Goldman Sachs’ David Solomon and Citi’s Jane Fraser to Microsoft’s Satya Nadella and X’s Elon Musk, have since reached a far broader viewers, with 5mn complete downloads.
The upbeat 58-year-old host says the podcast format permits for “extra time to discover what’s driving their companies and them as folks”.
“What are they attempting to enhance, what does the aggressive panorama appear like, how do they win within the market,” are the kinds of questions that don’t naturally lend themselves to a fast soundbite or information story, but say quite a bit about how an organization is run, Tangen says.
His In Good Firm sequence is among the many business-focused podcasts which have sprung as much as showcase top-flight chief executives as hosts, interviewees or each. Others embrace The Diary Of A CEO, an interview present with British entrepreneur Steven Bartlett that appears at enterprise and private improvement; All-In, hosted by a gaggle of tech-focused enterprise capitalists; Acquired’s deep dives into well-known manufacturers; and Masters of Scale led by co-founder of LinkedIn Reid Hoffman.
Seeking to educate and entertain, a few of these reveals rank among the many hottest on streaming websites. They enchantment to executives searching for to achieve specialist audiences and listeners who might not beforehand have engaged with their firms. The male-dominated expertise business, particularly, has discovered this a helpful medium; Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg appeared just lately on Acquired. It permits founders and executives to speak to one another in a extra relaxed manner.
Outdoors of tech, firms’ communications and advertising groups are turning to audio as a method to focus on their professional data and speak to books. Goldman, for instance, has its personal podcast sequence, Goldman Sachs Exchanges, by which high managers on the financial institution converse to business figures about necessary points shaping the worldwide financial system. KPMG’s UK chair, Bina Mehta, hosts the Pull Up a Chair podcast with different high administrators.
CEOs have warmed to the peer-to-peer format, which some see as a approach to mitigate reputational threat. The interviews happen in a extra casual and fewer confrontational setting, typically with out the extent of scrutiny a chief govt may count on to obtain from a newspaper or TV journalist. (Tangen says his visitors have “enhancing rights”, though these are exercised very hardly ever. They’ll additionally hearken to the podcast in full earlier than it goes dwell.)
The format permits visitors extra management over how they convey, to form their very own narrative and to interact straight with their chosen viewers, typically at size (some podcast episodes, for instance Acquired’s current dialogue with Howard Schultz from Starbucks, exceed three hours).
Communications specialists say podcasts can encourage executives to talk extra overtly and on a extra private degree. This will supply listeners — who usually embrace workers, shareholders in addition to clients and business specialists — an unfiltered view of the individual operating the corporate.
“The open-ended format lets executives carry their commentary to life with all kinds of fabric that may in any other case get left on the cutting-room flooring — anecdotes, ebook references, you title it,” says Joshua Rosen, at communications agency Prosek Companions. “Detours and rabbit holes aren’t simply welcome — they’re inspired. And so there’s extra room to point out depth and breadth, that you’re an authority in your business, however that you simply additionally see the larger image.”
Rosen provides that, for many executives, the push to seem on podcasts has much less to do with “searching for secure areas” and extra about exhibiting off “the flexibility to riff”. The extra relaxed interviews usually complement conventional media appearances, quite than exchange them, he says.
However this softer-touch strategy, which may make executives really feel like they’re speaking to a good friend, could make it trickier to carry them to account over particular enterprise selections and actions or give room for probing questioning. An interviewee shutting down or offering a “no remark” doesn’t make for good podcast content material.
Tangen challenges the suggestion that visitors may favor the softer strategy of a fellow govt to a conventional media grilling, saying he’s educated in navy interrogation and has spent a whole profession needling CEOs as a portfolio supervisor. “I’ve been doing it my complete life.”
Veteran journalist and communications specialist Richard Miron based podcasting firm Earshot Methods in 2017 to assist firms form their messages. He says whereas podcasts may give “CEOs a platform to create a sanitised and unquestioned model of what they wish to say”, these people solely come throughout as picket, scripted and boring. Coming below scrutiny and being put below stress by shareholders and journalists is one thing that’s “good for them”.
If firms are going via a foul spell and don’t wish to come throughout as guarded, “don’t do it. Stick out a press launch as a substitute”, says Miron. “Individuals like emotional engagement. If the CEO isn’t doing that, it’s going to be dry. When you’re requested questions similar to, ‘Why are you such an amazing CEO?’ nobody goes to pay attention.”
Miron says so many company executives have gone via hours of media coaching, typically with disaster response groups shut at hand, to formulate optimum responses to any potential questions from information retailers. Whereas communications groups may suppose this helps them, “it’s now not perceived as real”, he says. “CEOs who present a little bit of leg and are extra regular is surprising and other people like that.”
For the person or firm internet hosting the podcast, it’s also a approach to attain youthful generations who’re consuming information and media in a different way — turning extra to social platforms and video content material. Some podcasters report video footage of their interviews, which they publish on social media. Others conduct dwell occasions, too.
Tangen notes that internet hosting his personal podcast has introduced advantages for his firm — Norges Financial institution Funding Administration, which oversees the oil fund, has acquired a flood of job inquiries that it believes is partially pushed by the podcast. “In Norway, we’d at all times have an enormous quantity of purposes,” says Tangen. “However we’re seeing greater purposes in New York and London than we now have prior to now. Dramatically greater.”
And but, regardless of being a major investor in a number of the world’s largest firms, Tangen faces the identical points enterprise journalists do in securing his interview visitors. “It’s a tough combat to get them on [with] communications departments whose solely job it appears, generally, is to ensure they by no means seem on any podcasts, so it’s actually troublesome,” says Tangen. However he stays persistent, noting: “My spouse [Katja Tangen] turned me down the primary time.”
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