Since Donald Trump took office in January 2017, he has issued tens of thousands of tweets--some positive, some angry, some serious, some bonkers. Invariably, the media reacts, as do we, the public. This may seem like a dynamic peculiar to our current moment, but while the technology is relatively new, the underlying human story is as old as the Republic. We U.S. citizens are obsessed with our presidents--always have been. But that's only part of the picture. What often escapes notice is presidents' equally intense obsession with how they are viewed by the citizenry and their unrelenting efforts to influence public opinion, working both through the press--from the 18th-century broadsheet to social media--and around it.

When it comes to gaining buy-in for a new idea, we've been taught to focus on getting the idea right instead of on making sure people understand and support it. That, explains Kotter, has left us unprepared to deal with the attacks that can kill off even the most carefully developed concepts. In this edited interview, the leadership expert discusses various idea-killing attacks and offers some rules for responding to them. Whether you're working on a small deal with just a few players or a large-scale change effort in an organization of thousands, you're in the "murky land of human nature and group dynamics," Kotter says. People's anxieties and opinions color the way they react to new ideas. Kotter and Lorne Whitehead have identified four common ways that people shoot down ideas: fear-mongering, death by delay, confusion, and ridicule. Marginalizing the troublemakers might seem like the obvious response, but Kotter and Whitehead have found that people who were effective at gaining support for their ideas invited naysayers to critique their ideas and treated them with respect. They also communicated clearly and simply, never let the disagreement become personal, attended to the entire group instead of just to the most vocal critics, and prepared responses to a variety of potential attacks. Learning how to win buy-in for an idea is a basic life skill, Kotter says-one that is as relevant to a student working on a group project as it is to an executive in a business setting.