I just spent a very interesting evening at dinner discussing — as Douglas Adams would have put it, in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – life, the universe, and everything — with half a dozen very intelligent, passionate, intelligent business colleagues here in Austin, Texas. But nobody is going to blog anything about what we said.

Maybe that’s not a great loss. After all, we didn’t come up with a cure for cancer, or a plan for peace in the Middle East. We didn’t figure out a way to end the paralysis in Washington, or solve the imminent financial crisis with Social Security. Our conversations focused instead mostly on business issues — how companies are run, how corporate leaders made decisions and inspire leadership among their troops, and how the front-line people interact with the customers who buy our products and services. Mundane stuff, I suppose, but it’s the day-to-day bread-and-butter stuff that all of us deal with, and that ultimately determines whether we’re going to succeed or fail in our jobs. A lot of thought-provoking statements were made, and some good advice was offered. But nobody is going to blog about anything we said.

Why not? Well, the immediate answer is simple and obvious: other than me, none of my colleagues has a blog. Two of my dinner companions work in a semi-autonomous capacity, and they could certainly create a personal/professional blog if they wanted to do so; but the others work in a corporate environment, and I doubt that their corporate culture would approve of such behavior. You can tell, of course, that I’m being reasonably careful not to identify the individuals involved, or the organizations they work for; I’m not trying to cause them any problems, or imply any criticism of their employers. But I still think it’s significant to repeat: valuable ideas were discussed this evening, and nobody is going to blog about anything we said.

Perhaps the explanation is that most people don’t want to share their thoughts with strangers; but a couple of the people who spoke passionately to me this evening about their ideas of business and professional life were barely one step removed from strangerdom: they didn’t know where I live, know almost nothing about by background, and have no idea of my personal tastes (e.g., “So what kind of music do you like?”) Notwithstanding this lack of familiarity, they were more than willing to talk to me about fairly serious, intimate details of day-to-day life in the business world. And if they’re willing to have such a conversation with an almost-stranger (i.e., me), why not a total stranger (i.e., someone who reads a blog)? Perhaps the answer is that they were reasonably sure that I was not an outright competitor or enemy; who knows what other reason there might be …

As for the explanation that “my company wouldn’t approve of me blogging” … well, telling tales out of school to an almost-stranger could be dangerous. But I’m not a journalist, or a celebrity, or a politician; if someone passes on some gossip to me, it’s unlikely that I’ll know anyone that would be even slightly interested, let along malicious enough to publish it in the Daily Enquirer. Yeah, I suppose that if an employee of company X blogged some salacious details about his boss’s affair with his secretary, it might eventually make the front page of the New York Daily News … but most gossip is truly boring. If someone blogged about it, would anyone really notice?

Perhaps a solution would be to encourage freelance bloggers to offer their services to write anonymous blogs for people who have a story to tell, a lesson to teach, a bit of corporate gossip to pass on, or a bit of corporate wisdom to encapsulate and publish for anyone who wants to see it. For example, I heard this evening two or three stories that were variations of the old adage of, “Give the customer a solution to his problem, but make him think that he found the solution, so that he’ll endorse it and recommend it to his boss.” I wish I was able to give you the details, because it might have been sufficient to persuade you to benefit from the advice … and if I had been able to blog about it anonymously, on behalf of one of my business colleagues at dinner, perhaps it would have worked.

Well, perhaps it will be a career to pursue at some point in the future, when I’m done with the information technology field …