The Amazing Power of Understatement
Under-promise, over-deliver
We arrived at the Washington Post and were led into a richly paneled boardroom, where editors, reporters, columnists, and editorial executives outnumbered us five or six to one. Tuxedoed waiters served lunch while I pondered what careers had been sidetracked or sunk in the kind of question-and-answer session about to come. Editorial board meetings are a rich forum to tell your story, but never without risk.
The year was 1997. Seven years earlier, a former college football coach named Bill McCartney had founded a ministry-turned-movement called Promise Keepers. Across the United States, a succession of men's stadium conferences had touched a national nerve, leading now to an event known as "Stand in the Gap-A Sacred Assembly of Men" on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Before that, the force of the movement would propel McCartney into the front lines of national and international media, both to promote Stand in the Gap and to explain it.
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