on trust

Thursday night, we had a team dinner with our Mexican counterparts at Antica Posta (a restaurant that's coming to rival Ecco for best Italian in Atlanta). Three hours over wine and veal is probably not a necessary expense in a struggling economy. But somewhere between the lobster bruschetta and the panna cotta, with multiple conversations flowing in a mixture of English and Spanish, we got more done than we did in three days of meetings.

Antica Posta might have the best foie gras in town.

Breaking bread is a way to share a human experience. It's a interaction designed to build trust. It creates a space for the emails, phone calls, and Webexes to become relevant. It brings the words to life, and bridges the gaps in communication and understanding that a conference call or two-day deep dive meeting can't.

I'm not a fan of The Purpose-Driven Life. It's probably because I'm not Christian, and I grew up as a very obvious minority in the heart of the Bible belt. But - there is a piece of the book that I remember often. On Day 18, Warren tells us that life is meant to be shared.

I've said before that I find blogging hard. It's hard to trust people you don't know (and in some cases, even harder to trust the ones you do know) with your words and thoughts. It's very public, and in the world today it's very permanent.

I get grief all the time for not having a Facebook wall or public photos. I am inherently a private person. I prefer to send a hundred personal emails (as some of you can attest) or spend hours on the phone rather than post a public comment or photo album. Words, in my mind, are a gift, given intentionally, to a particular person or group, to create or inspire or motivate or understand. I'm afraid that when I put ideas out for everyone to read, I dilute the ability to speak to this person, in this moment, with this particular cause. And most of all, I'm afraid that you won't respond not because you don't agree with me, but because the words don't speak to you.

So my blog, like dinner, is a lesson for me in trust. It's about designing a space that allows me to trust the people who care enough about my ideas to read them, and about you trusting me to be honest and open with my thoughts. It's about slowly giving up privacy in favor of sharing a human experience and a human perspective.

Team dinner.  I'm going to trust that you won't reproduce without permission.

Blogging, however, does not come with the perks of foie gras or Italian buffalo mozzarella that team dinner does.