Too Much, Too Often, Too Funny

Too Much, Too Often, Too Funny

I have a problem. I over-communicate. I talk too much I’m sure, but what I really do too much is write. It takes form in all aspects of my life, both personal and business. Self awareness is a good thing, but recognition without solution may not be all that valuable. Not that many of the people I run with are in Wikipedia, but I am. It states a number of things about me that are less than flattering, but the thing that jumps out at people is that I supposedly got slammed (they called it “deuced” at one time before that got Wikied out of the post) for writing things in my blog of the moment that got me fired from my job. It’s not true in terms of cause and effect, but it’s true that I wrote the blog and that the New York Times wrote an article about what I said in the blog. People have offered to help me cleanse my online profile so that these things disappear into oblivion, but for some strange reason they don’t bother me as much as people feel they should. The truth is that they do occasionally weigh on me, but mostly I don’t care. It’s less about the notion that any press is good press and more that I just don’t have that “keep it personal” thing in my head.

It took me over a decade to start another blog, but here I am (because my son one day asked why I didn’t write a blog). The thing I like about writing a blog is that gives me an outlet and yet anyone who doesn’t want to read what I have to say can just opt out. They can choose to not subscribe or they can choose not to read new stories or even only read ones that interest them and ignore the rest. I know that I am far more prolific than many others. I also know that many people find that either over-indulgent or simply boring, all of which is fine by me for the most part.

This is all on my mind this morning because of two incidents that came at me this weekend. The first is that I run a venture that is sort of a remote operation on several levels. The main labs and test facilities are in northern Scotland, where half of our staff sits. The two guys who are responsible for that team live in the U.S. in New Jersey and Massachusetts. They spend half their time in Scotland, but I have a hard time keeping track of whether they are over there or back here at any given time. My calls, texts or emails to them usually start with, “where are you right now?” The rest of my team is New York-based, but not always in the office. People regularly work remotely and not always even in the office. Some some work remotely most days and others do so one or two days a week (particularly now that it’s summertime). Our vendor/partners are also located in far-flung places like Iceland, Italy, Massachusetts, North Carolina and God-knows where next. We have investment bankers located in London and have fundraising connections in the Netherlands, Switzerland, Norway, Denmark, Germany, Turkey, Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates. For a little pischer of a company, we are more global and far-flung than even we can imagine.

We occasionally meet face-to-face, but most often we communicate by a combination of teleconferences (increasingly video via the new venture powerhouse, Zoom) and the written word. It is important to my thinking that I (as the leader of the effort) work hard to communicate what’s on my mind or what I am hearing from this quarter or that. So, I write emails. My lawyer knows that I will refute that the permanency and discoverability of emails make them dangerous. I’ve been down that road and I believe that leadership demands integrity and integrity is reinforced by the absolute willingness to commit your thoughts to writing in the properly and carefully worded manner that I feel I have learned to do over forty-five years. The decision is clear to me: communicate fully but carefully for effectiveness or go dark for protection and suffer from miscommunications.

I find it interesting to think about the ways everyone chooses to communicate in reply. Some text, some email, some call, some stay quiet. The staying quiet route seems most popular and I can’t tell if they feel it is the safest course, they have no point of view worth sharing, they are otherwise too busy or they are subtly boycotting my managerial written exuberance. I have learned it is best to stop at wondering and not make the transition to assuming.

On the personal front it is a bit funnier. I can’t seem to help myself. I can think of several groups with whom I over-communicate. There are the family chat-groups. My kids sort of get my sense of humor, but they don’t agree with or choose to emulate my degree of openness. They are all more private than me and more prone to embarrassment (that is mostly a function of age). I like to kid, and usually stay within the lines, but every once in a while stray to things that my wife shakes her head at (usually too late, since patience is not generally one of my virtues).

My motorcycle group is well-versed in my humor and written renditions of our rides and the prep for our rides. It rolls off of them for the most part and I have yet to step on toes in a noticeable manner. Some say they like the stories, some say nothing. Most like the collection of stories that I have accumulated over the years and like the idea of my publishing a book of the history of the group over twenty-five years. I generally feel appreciated for being the group scribe.

My college group recently started planning their 45th reunion gathering for 2020. I did not start the email chain, but I did choose to weigh in with some humor to spur the gathering juices and just because I like to kid. The guy in the group who may be the most successful (financially speaking) and is certainly the most regal of the group, read the string and made a mild joke in keeping with his prized image of being parsimonious (a.k.a. cheap). When I built upon that with some personal vignettes that I thought were quite funny (I may have a low bar on the subject), he has responded that all this spam in his inbox is getting tiresome. Now that may have been just an escalation in the humor mill, but I suspect he was truly put off or bored by my email. At this point I have three courses of action; ignore it, fight it, or over-communicate about it. Guess which one I chose?