I still can’t forget the South African expat who confessed to me while drunk at another bar, that he plants people at a popular Lagos bar for expats to eavesdrop on conversations of his competitors to know what they are doing. Lady Whistledown is real and people are careless.
He did this for years to be able to get ahead. He was head of strategy for one of the telcos and eventually he got into trouble and was let go. I learned a valuable lesson about speaking in public and also crossing lines without scruples. He paid those you would least suspect.
I started listening more at restaurants instead of talking and realized that what he did was very easy. You could hear people more especially at bars after they have drunk a bit too much. One day, someone was talking loudly about my uncle and I was behind him, heard everything.
He eventually came for a job and my uncle employed him. I told my uncle about the incident and he laughed. Whenever he wants to discuss something very sensitive, we went out for walks, far away from the house. He had the house swept for bugs but employees were the greatest risk.
A friend’s wife was the SA to a governor, they had planted a domestic servant in their household for over a year who was photocopying documents that the other side used against her boss much later. The shadows have spirits and the night is full of terrors.
The easiest way to live is not to have too many secrets written down anywhere. Anything that has become explicit will be copied and shared. The best secrets are also never spoken about but mutually understood. True criminals rarely gloat over crimes, they strategize and act.
This is the same for highly effective tyrants. It is only in time of crisis that the details are discussed and new strategies are formed. The NVIDIA CEO made a point once where he said that he talks at once to everyone and not separately to people. People missed the nuance.
Bezos abhorred communication between teams. You need to work so well together that most things are understood and require less communication. The less communication the better the secrets are preserved.
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