In his memoir Where Else Would You Rather Be?, Hall of Fame football coach Marv Levy offered some advice to coaches on how to speak to the press. Levy recognized that offense wins games, but defense wins championships–but he also knew that sportswriters prefer to hear, and write, about offense.  So he advised the following:

Talk about offense. Talk about your aerial circus. Give it a signature name. Call it “The Coast-to-Coast Offense,” or announce, as an alternative, that it will be known–if your last name is Kappelmeier–by the appellation “Air Kappelmeier”. Talk about how innovative you are. Tell them you invented the spiral. Tell them that you like to roll the dice, that punting is for sissies, and that defense is for criminal lawyers. Use words like “razzle dazzle” and every synonymous term you can dredge up. Don’t talk about reverses; talk about triple reverses and fake reverses. Tell the world how you are going to go for it on fourth down, probably with a play-action pass. Say something catchy, such as, “Our offense will take no prisoners” or “Wait until you see our weapons of mass destruction.” And then–do what it takes to win. (p. 214)

Levy’s advice applies to other endeavors besides football.  More often than not, what people want to hear and what actually needs to be done to succeed are very different.

This is why the field of public relations exists. In theory, the job of a public relations person is to handle saying what people want to hear, while the rest of the organization handles doing what needs to be done.

Some people can do what Levy describes: they can wear their public relations hat and tell everyone what sounds good, and then take off that hat and resume doing their jobs. I’m no expert, but I get the sense that Steve Jobs was one of these people.

Where problems happen is if you get a P.R. person who believes their own P.R. pitch running the show.  If somebody who is great at telling people what they want to hear accidentally takes control of the behind-the-scenes stuff, it can lead to prolonged problems for an organization.  Worse yet, it’s hard to get rid of such a person, because he will keep telling people what they want to hear, and thus they will be sympathetic towards him and too willing to forgive failures.