Impromptu

7Be Respectful

Daniel Craig, the 47‐year‐old actor who portrayed James Bond for nearly a decade, had just finished filming Spectre, his fourth Bond movie and the twenty‐fourth in the franchise. He had one more Bond film to do—according to the terms of his contract—but he had been offered a new role in a TV series. When a reporter asked Craig if he thought he'd ever play Bond again, he declared, “I'd rather break this glass and slash my wrists…. All I want to do is move on.”¹

Aware that he'd insulted the Bond franchise, Craig did some quick damage control and the studio didn't fire him. But the fact that such a seasoned actor would veer off course and slam the role he'd been playing shows how careful we have to be when speaking spontaneously. Imagine an employee announcing publicly, “I'd rather slash my wrists than stay in this job another year! All I want to do is move on.”

Today people speak off the cuff in ways that sometimes show disrespect for their organization and their colleagues. This habit may well derive from four emerging realities. First, people go “off script” more than they once did. The older approach of delivering vetted scripts was safer. Second, social media has amplified our voices, giving the angry or disgruntled a platform that not long ago did not exist. Bad news, whether broadcast in YouTube clips or tweets, seems to spread more rapidly than positive stories. Such irreverence and antagonism has become, for many, a cultural norm. Third, people change ...