You know something others don’t. Maybe you heard about the reorganization before it was announced. Maybe you understand why the project really got killed. Maybe you have insight into what leadership is actually prioritizing.
Your instinct might be to share what you know. To be helpful. To keep people informed. To demonstrate that you’re plugged in.
But information is currency. And like any currency, how you spend it determines what you get in return.
I learned this lesson during a period when I had advance knowledge about a major organizational restructuring. Through a casual conversation with a senior leader, I’d learned that two departments were going to be merged, several roles would be eliminated, and reporting structures would change significantly. The announcement wasn’t planned for another month.
My first instinct was to share this information broadly. I wanted to help people prepare, to show that I was well-connected, to be the person who kept others informed. I started dropping hints in conversations, sharing pieces of the story with different colleagues, feeling good about being helpful and demonstrating my insider knowledge.
What I didn’t realize was that I was spending valuable currency carelessly. By the time the official announcement came, I had given away all my information without gaining anything strategic in return. Worse, some of the information had spread in ways that created unnecessary anxiety and speculation, and leadership wasn’t pleased about the leaks.
Meanwhile, I watched a more experienced colleague handle similar information completely differently. When she learned about budget cuts affecting her project, she shared the information strategically with her manager to demonstrate her awareness of business constraints, with her team lead to help plan contingencies, and with a peer in finance to understand the broader implications. Each conversation was purposeful, timed appropriately, and resulted in stronger relationships and better positioning for her team.
Every organization has an invisible information economy. People trade insights, share intelligence, and build relationships through what they know and when they choose to reveal it. Some people are always broke in this economy: they give away everything they know immediately, leaving themselves with no leverage and no unique value.
Others are strategic. They understand that information has different values at different times, to different people, in different contexts. They spend their knowledge like investors, not like people trying to empty their pockets. They understand that information is one of the few forms of power that doesn’t diminish when you share it strategically, but it can disappear completely if you share it carelessly.
In the information economy, the people who spend wisely don’t just stay informed but become influential.