A CEO can talk frankly in his office or on the golf course. Perhaps even in front of the board. At any other time he should be scripted. I occasionally had a

A CEO can talk frankly in his office or on the golf course. Perhaps even in front of the board. At any other time he should be scripted. I occasionally had a call from the CEO's secretary to review any statements about systems in my domain. Usually that was distilled down to one bulletpoint on a slide, but it still had to be checked and approved. Too much at stake to let him ad lib from memory. One of his predecessors did so in the late 90s and publically committed us to a Web retail presence within a year. That was not a fun year.