If the only lesson you take away from the Sony hack situation is “be careful what you put in writing” then you are missing several major lessons. That’s a lesson all of us should have learned many times over before this point. The bigger lessons are these:
- Strategy can’t be put together entirely offline. Your strategy decisions (and how you get to them) live forever. Always be thinking about future audiences will view your current decisions.
- Just because you have a conversation offline doesn’t mean that pieces of it won’t make their way back online through quotes in other conversations. This is a hyper-connected world where anything can make its way online.
- Panic is always bad and should be avoided in written or offline conversations.
- Secrets always find their way out in the least useful way possible. Always be prepared to deal with it.
This is particularly true for CRE projects which often require a significant element of secrecy to ensure that negotiations are protected.