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Integrity of Communication 161

is known as a charismatic speaker, but his outgoing communication
style during D1’s growth years was surprisingly simple and redundant.
This was by design. In regular monthly meetings with his entire staff,
he would recap D1’s direction and priorities by addressing three basic
questions: Where have we been? Where are we now? Where are we going (and
why)? In the next month’s session, he would follow the same format,
adapting his comments to reflect any changes. And if you bumped
into him in the hallway at any point in between, his thoughts would
follow the same familiar pattern. His goal was to ensure that every
single person in the venture was fully informed about his intentions
and his thinking. He believed the stakes related to overcommunicating
were far too high to leave this to chance.

In every interaction, J.C. was also intently focused on gathering
new data and learning from others. He reserved a quarter of his time
for working on communication and culture throughout the business
and would often circulate among employees at all levels and in all
areas. A gifted conversationalist who quickly put people at ease, he
usually appeared to be simply shooting the breeze. He was, but he also
followed a consistent process of asking questions to understand the
guts of the growing business from the ground up. His ready grasp of
D1 from top to bottom, which seemed to come so naturally, was the
hard-earned result of his commitment to overcommunication. “I have
heard a lot of business leaders say they wanted to make communica-
tion an underpinning of their company,” observes Bob Tucker, J.C.
Faulkner’s long-time business attorney. “I have never seen anyone
focus on it to the degree that D1 focused on it, and I think it is easy to
underestimate how much effort it takes to create good thinking. Com-
munication is a very, very effective way to enhance the odds of that
coming about.”

Four Personal Tools for Bursting
the Feel-Good Bubble

Integrity of communication starts at the personal level with the fun-
damental issue of how a founder deals with incoming data and opin-

American Management Association • www.amanet.org