Wednesday 29 April 2009

Careless Talk Costs Lives


This was a poster campaign in the Second World War, and was to raise awareness of talking in public and of who might be listening around you.

After an event that occurred to me today, and thinking back to an incident at IBM, it is frightening to see what people will do in desperation.

Today, I went to register the .com, .co.uk and .net domains for my next business venture only to find out that the .com domain had been registered only four days ago. That's the luck of the draw I hear you say. But what galled me was to find out that the registrant of the domain was none other than the work colleague of someone who had been guiding me with the company set-up. Suffice to say, we can only assume that this colleague over heard part of his telephone conversation outside the building, and decided to spite him by 'nicking' the domain name. So I'm having to deal with trying to buy the .com domain name for my purposes. Thankfully, I know the person concerned and hopefully get them to see sense and sell it to me for little or no profit.

As for the case in IBM. IBM sponsors certain Business Partners to have access badges to the public spaces in their buildings to allow smooth running of their community and facilitation of meetings. Apparently, a couple of years ago IBM had to withdraw all the Business Partner access badges after it was revealed in an investigation, that a Business Partner had acted upon information they had overheard between IBM'ers in a public space that lost them the deal, but won it for the Business Partner. Suffice to say that was a major breach of trust that cost the company financially, inconvenienced the whole Business Partner community and alienated the IBM sales teams toward working with partners.

So think about who's listening, next time you are having a conversation on a train, plane or in a public space.

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