Against the benchmark of a credible, believable, self-assured CEO of a major enterprise, in a major television broadcast regarding a significant crisis – conveyed through their affect, body language, speech and words – I scored CrowdStrike’s CEO George Kurtz in his Today show interview as: 9/10.
OVERALL, Kurtz’s presentation of himself and communication of his ideas was of a high standard, and this was reinforced by Kurtz doing a major media interview, to explain the incident, quickly after the incident happened.
Below is further analysis:
POSITIVE areas included:
- Kurtz’s serious facial expression at the start of interview that conveyed the high importance he placed on dealing with the incident.
- Immediately, at the start of the interview, saying he was deeply sorry for the impact that was caused by the incident.
- The energy in his voice tone and speaking cadence.
- Throughout the interview, Kurtz’s ‘matter of face’ speaking. There was no ‘spinning’ of the message.
- Clearly explaining the cause of the incident.
- His succinct answers to the questions.
- The believability of his statement, “Our mission and why we’re here is to make sure that every customer is fully recovered and we’re not going relent until we get every customer back to where they were.”
ONE area for improvement is this.
To underscore the pain caused to people from this incident, at the end of the interview Kurtz should have restated that he was deeply sorry.
Kurtz’s performance was a polar opposite to the poor media performances; of the Woolworth’s CEO in February 2024 and, of the former Optus CEO, in 2022 and 2023.
