BE AS QUICK AS THE NEWS

So your CEO wants to write something topical and newsy?

Great! Jumping on news is valuable. It shows your audience that your leaders are engaged and have a clear understanding of the context in which they operate. It’s how you build trust and authority, and with thought leadership and exec comms, that’s pretty much the whole game.

But in 2025 the shelf life of news is shorter than the shelf life of raw chicken left out on a hot day. So if you want to respond to something current, you need to be quick about it or it won’t have the impact you want it to.

So how do you do this? You need to be like a TV chef who pulls a roast chicken from the oven, cheerfully declaring “here’s one I prepared earlier”.

You need to figure out what subjects your exec is willing to comment on, you need to set up an accelerated approval process, and you need to pre-write those opinions in a way that they can just be tweaked on the day.

If you’re prepping the chicken after the headline, it will start to stink pretty quickly.