Protecting your personal and professional identity is vitally important because everybody knows everybody. Rather than 6 degrees of separation, I’m finding that a significant amount of new professional contacts are actually only 2 or 3 times removed from my former professional contacts.
In the modern era people move around and communicate so easily and often with people in other social and professional groups. This is especially true in the areas I’ve been working in: data security and compliance. Just today I was chatting with a guy in Colorado who knew my former colleagues (back in San Diego) on a first name basis. The other night I happened to fall into a conversation with a CEO of a company that is a business partner of my current company.
Of course, this is all predicated on the notion that your identity is good because you are consistently acting in an ethical fashion. When someone in the chain can’t be trusted, the whole system gets topsy-turvy. And so a corrolary maxim is that one has to align oneself with other people and companies that also have good reputations.