Today, at work, I had to give a talk on my technical speciality, to a bunch of local and foreign business people. As each of these people represented a host of unseen shareholders, poised with their cheque books over my company shares, my instructions were 1. Duty of care disclosure: tell them everything we know or could reasonably be expected to know and don't leave anything out under pain of ASX investigation, but...2. Don't dare tell them anything that could erode our competitive advantage. The mutual exclusivity of these instructions makes for a fine edge of concentration and short fingernails I can tell you.
Like many people I can react to stress by letting the leash of my tongue in the most bizarre and unpredictable ways. In fact, the situation may resemble riding one's bike towards an inconveniently placed tree in the middle of the path - the more you focus on it the more likely it is you are going to hit it smack on, arms, handlebars and manic grin frozen in place until the moment of ignominious impact. Why do we do that ? It can't have evolutionary survival value.
So..I began to worry that I would blurt the company secrets out (or equally damning, not blurt them out). How could I recover from such a gaffe ? Given that the words, once spoken, can't be plucked back out of the air, it seems to me that the only way would be to camouflage them: If I were to sprinkle my otherwise lucid, focussed, ruthlessly logical yet urbanely witty talk, from the start, with completely out of context and loony statements - well nobody would know which were the real gaffes and which were the products of technical tourettes syndrome.
I think I got away with it.
Catchya
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