Deny till you die

For several years, a man I will call Mr VAM used two expressions often enough for them to become part of the language around him. One was “in sales and war all is allowed.” The other was “deny till you die.” They were usually delivered with humour and were easy to treat as the kind of exaggerated sayings that gather around forceful personalities. Most such sayings deserve no more attention than that. These became harder to dismiss because, over time, they seemed to describe not only what Mr VAM said but how he dealt with situations in which different versions of himself threatened to meet.

The first place I noticed this had nothing to do with business. At home, Mr VAM belonged to a strict Reformed community and occupied the visible position expected of a respectable family man. During long periods in Asia, however, his private life did not always correspond with that image, and he made little secret of it among the people who worked closely with him. The inconsistency itself was not remarkable. People fail to live up to their stated values all the time, and religion does not make them immune to that. What stayed with me was that the two versions appeared to require remarkably little reconciliation. They existed in different places, before different audiences, and therefore rarely had to confront one another. If they ever did, there was already a practical answer available: deny till you die.

Years earlier, while holding a senior position in a company I will call ISC, Mr VAM had written forcefully about a supplier supporting a competitor. His concern was precise. Pricing could move, technical information could reach another party, exclusive relationships could weaken, and support given in one direction could alter the competitive position somewhere else long before the damage appeared in an order book. He wrote in the language of trust, loyalty and the obligation to protect the interests of the organisation he represented. The correspondence matters less for what it says about that particular dispute than for what it establishes about Mr VAM. Commercial boundaries were not an abstraction to him. He understood why they existed and why apparently small movements of information, people and relationships could matter.

By April 2018, ISC was writing formally to a competitor about Mr VAM’s own activities. The company stated that customers had reported him presenting himself as a prospective representative of that competitor, that non-competition and non-disclosure obligations remained in force, and that concerns had already arisen while he was still employed by ISC. A letter of this kind proves only that ISC believed these things strongly enough to put them in writing; it does not turn the allegations into findings. Its importance lies in the timing. The boundary was not invented later, after relationships had deteriorated and lawyers had started reconstructing events. It was being contested while people still knew who worked for whom and while the commercial positions were still separate.

What followed became easier to explain once it was over than while it was happening. People associated with ISC appear in records connected with the emerging competing organisation before every formal connection with ISC had ended. A separate structure becomes increasingly visible, and by 2019 there is an operating Indonesian entity with a director and shareholder, administration, bank arrangements, property, projects and commissions. At the end of the year, ISC announces that it will acquire the new organisation, and Mr VAM returns not as the former executive whose activities had once caused concern but as a shareholder and senior leader. From that end of the chronology, the sequence can be described as entrepreneurial convergence. From the beginning, it had looked sufficiently different for the original company to issue warnings.

The facts do not change when an acquisition takes place, but their meaning can. Competition becomes strategic positioning, overlap becomes transition, and relationships that once appeared to cross an organisational boundary can later be described as having anticipated a combination that had not yet formally occurred. A commercial structure that once sat outside the company becomes an asset within it, and someone whose activities had been treated as a threat can later be presented as bringing valuable capability back into the organisation. Nothing needs to be erased for this transformation to occur. The ending supplies a vocabulary in which the beginning can be retold.

This is where Mr VAM’s two sayings begin to fit together more closely than they first appear to. “In sales and war all is allowed” is expansive. It gives action the benefit of interpretation before anyone has had to explain it: a conversation may be exploratory, assistance informal, preparation legitimate and an opportunity simply too valuable to ignore. “Deny till you die” works in the opposite direction afterwards. Once the same conduct becomes the subject of dispute, interpretation contracts. The question shifts away from whether an action sat comfortably with standards previously defended and toward whether someone else can establish exactly what happened, when it happened and which obligation applied at that precise moment.

There is nothing inherently improper in demanding proof. Quite the opposite. Serious allegations should be tested, memories are unreliable, documents can be incomplete and commercial disputes tend to produce accounts in which everyone finds their own chronology persuasive. The difficulty appears only when uncertainty seems to perform different functions depending on when it enters the story. Before an action, uncertainty can enlarge the room in which judgement operates. Afterwards, the same uncertainty can become the reason why judgement must be postponed.

That difference matters little until time is added to it. Documents become harder to retrieve, people leave, companies change ownership, systems are replaced and the managers who inherit an old file rarely inherit the memory that once made it urgent. A disputed event can survive for years without ever being resolved and eventually arrive at a stage where the question is no longer simply whether it happened, but why anyone still wants to establish that it did. Nothing has necessarily been disproved. The institutional need to prove it has merely weakened.

Seen individually, there is nothing remarkable in any of this. A contested customer approach can have an innocent explanation. An employment overlap may have been authorised. A new company can represent legitimate preparation for life after an old one. A regulatory matter can be closed without establishing wrongdoing because there was none, and a denial in response to a serious accusation may simply reflect sensible legal advice. The difficulty appears only when uncertainty repeatedly seems most generous before an action and most exacting once that action has to be explained.

Mr VAM’s earlier correspondence makes this asymmetry visible because he had once occupied the other position. When information and relationships appeared to be moving away from the company he represented, their significance seemed clear enough without waiting for a court, regulator or arbitrator to establish every fact. He did not require a final judgment before recognising the risk to trust or competitive position. That is hardly surprising. Managers are required to make decisions before certainty exists, because commercial certainty frequently arrives only after the moment at which it would have been useful.

The standard becomes more interesting when comparable uncertainty concerns one’s own conduct. Questions that previously invited practical judgement can then become questions demanding increasingly precise definitions. It may matter exactly when a relationship began, what contractual provision applied on a particular date, whether information was formally confidential rather than merely commercially sensitive, whether an employee technically remained employed, whether permission had been given implicitly, or whether a particular conversation can be connected directly to a later commercial result. All of these distinctions can be legitimate. Their significance lies not in their existence, but in the possibility that the amount of precision demanded from a principle changes according to the direction in which the principle is operating.

At some point, denial can therefore cease to function merely as an answer and begin to function as a system. An answer belongs to the person who gives it and can be compared with documents, recollections and other accounts. A system distributes the problem differently. One person raises a question, another asks for evidence, someone else observes that the evidence may lack context, and eventually the discussion becomes less about the conduct that caused the question than about whether the available material is sufficient to justify continuing to ask it. Nobody has necessarily said anything demonstrably false. The original question has simply been converted into a problem of proof.

That conversion creates an unusual asymmetry. The person attempting to establish what happened must preserve correspondence, reconstruct dates, identify who knew what, distinguish inference from fact and explain why several events should be considered together. The person resisting that reconstruction has a narrower task. If one document is missing, the chronology may be incomplete. If the chronology is complete, the surrounding circumstances may remain uncertain. If the circumstances become clear, intention can still be disputed. Each objection may be reasonable on its own, yet the cumulative effect is that explanation requires an increasingly complete account while denial requires only one remaining area of uncertainty.

Organisations are particularly good at producing those areas of uncertainty because they are designed to divide complicated realities into manageable parts. Employment matters belong to HR, commercial questions to sales, contractual matters to legal, regulatory questions to compliance and corporate structures to finance or management. Usually this specialisation improves judgement. It can also make certain patterns unusually difficult to examine, because conduct that appears connected when viewed chronologically can become a collection of separate matters once distributed among different functions, different files and different people. The issue is not that any individual classification is wrong. It is that the relationship between the classifications can disappear.

This is why “deny till you die” is more sophisticated than the literal words suggest. Persistent denial in its simplest form would merely mean continuing to say that something did not happen, which is a fragile position once documents show that it did. A more durable method does not require rejecting the facts themselves. A meeting can be acknowledged while its purpose remains disputed. A relationship can be acknowledged while its significance is questioned. A document can be accepted as genuine while its meaning is contested. Events can therefore remain individually true while the connections between them remain permanently provisional.

The distinction matters because patterns exist in the connections rather than in the individual facts. A single employee moving between organisations proves little. A single customer conversation can be entirely ordinary. A company being incorporated, a quotation being exchanged, an email being forwarded or a commercial relationship being discussed may each have several legitimate explanations. The significance, if there is one, emerges only from sequence, overlap and context. Prevent the sequence from becoming one account, and every element can retain an innocent explanation indefinitely.

Time assists that process in a second way. It does not merely weaken evidence; it changes the standard by which people judge whether recovering the evidence is worth the effort. A question that might have demanded an immediate answer when the events were current can, years later, begin to look disproportionate simply because it remains unanswered. The conduct itself has become historical while the act of questioning it remains contemporary. Persistence slowly changes sides, until the unresolved event is treated as old news and the person still seeking resolution risks becoming the more immediate inconvenience.

There is an organisational paradox in this because nothing needs to have been disproved for the burden to shift. The person raising the issue continues to carry the responsibility for establishing it, while everyone else gradually acquires reasons to move on. New priorities arrive, commercial relationships change and the cost of reconstructing an old matter rises as its practical consequences become less obvious. What began as a question about another person’s conduct can eventually become a question about the judgement of the person who refuses to stop asking about it.

The method becomes more consequential when questions cease to be merely commercial. Later allegations and investigations involving fraud, bribery and dealings examined by enforcement authorities belong to a different evidentiary category and must stand or fall on their own records. An investigation does not establish guilt, and one disputed episode cannot properly be used as evidence for another. What can be compared is the response to uncertainty. As the questions become more serious, the temptation to separate disputed facts, resist premature connection and place the burden of assembling them into a coherent account on the person making the allegation becomes stronger rather than weaker.

That restraint is important because patterns are seductive. Once we think we recognise one, we begin to interpret ambiguous events as further examples of it, and the very act of searching for consistency can create more consistency than the evidence justifies. Anyone writing about events in which they were personally involved has an additional reason to be careful. Contemporary documents deserve greater weight than retrospective character judgments, and serious allegations should remain with those whose task it is to establish them. The sayings attributed to Mr VAM are not evidence of misconduct and should not be treated as such. Their relevance is narrower and, in some ways, more interesting: they provide an unusually concise description of a possible way of managing contradiction.

Applying principles more strictly to others than to oneself is not a rare human weakness. Most people preserve a stable view of their own character partly by changing the description of circumstances rather than the values they claim to hold. Conduct that looks disloyal from the receiving end may feel pragmatic from the acting end. Secrecy can become discretion, opportunism can become entrepreneurship, preparation can become foresight and an inconvenient pattern can remain a collection of unrelated incidents if there is enough reason to keep the incidents apart. None of this requires conscious hypocrisy. Contradictory versions of ourselves are surprisingly easy to maintain when they are never required to occupy the same frame.

This is the only reason the private part of Mr VAM’s story belongs here at all. It proves nothing about his business conduct and should not be asked to. Its relevance lies in offering an early illustration of the same architecture. The churchgoing family man and the stories from Asia could remain in separate compartments because they belonged to different audiences and different places. The executive defending confidentiality and the entrepreneur operating near comparable commercial boundaries belonged to different stages of a career. A code of conduct and a later investigation could occupy different files. No compartment had to defeat another as long as the compartments were not forced to meet.

Perhaps this is also why a direct lie can be less durable than denial. A lie makes a positive factual claim and therefore creates something that can eventually be disproved. Denial can demand much less. It does not need to replace one history with another, because it can survive by preventing either history from becoming sufficiently complete to be accepted as final. Explanation must make conflicting facts fit into a coherent account; denial needs only to preserve enough uncertainty for coherence to remain contestable.

The two expressions associated with Mr VAM therefore begin to look less like unrelated jokes and more like complementary parts of the same approach to judgement. “In sales and war all is allowed” expands the interpretive space available while events are unfolding. Conduct can remain pragmatic, exploratory or entrepreneurial for as long as its final meaning has not yet been fixed. “Deny till you die” performs the opposite function once questions arise by narrowing the circumstances under which an unfavourable interpretation may be accepted. One maxim gives action the benefit of ambiguity. The other gives ambiguity the benefit of time.

Neither principle is particularly unusual when examined separately. Business people often justify aggressive conduct by reference to competition, and lawyers quite properly insist that allegations be proved. The more interesting question appears when the two positions are occupied by the same person. If the threshold for acting is uncertainty while the threshold for accountability is proof, a large area opens between the two in which behaviour can be decisive when advantageous and permanently inconclusive when challenged.

That area is not created by law or by corporate governance alone. It is created by judgement, because somebody must decide when uncertainty is sufficient to justify a conclusion. When the interests of the organisation are threatened, experienced managers often pride themselves on seeing patterns before others do, connecting weak signals and acting before the evidence becomes overwhelming. The same habits can suddenly look speculative when the pattern points inward. The judgement that was once praised as commercial instinct can then be asked to wait for documentary certainty.

There is no need to assume bad faith for this to happen. Human beings generally experience their own intentions directly and other people’s intentions only through consequences. We therefore possess information about ourselves that we automatically use in our own defence but cannot extend to others. We know which compromises felt necessary, which conversations seemed harmless and which actions appeared temporary when we took them. The result is that our own conduct arrives surrounded by context, while somebody else’s arrives surrounded primarily by effects. The danger begins when we mistake this natural asymmetry of perspective for an objective difference in standards.

The more useful question is therefore not whether Mr VAM believed the explanations available to him. The record cannot establish that, and perhaps he believed them completely. The more useful question is whether the same principles continued to mean the same thing when their direction changed. Loyalty that appears simple when expected from an employee but complicated when expected from oneself is not necessarily hypocrisy, but it does deserve examination. Confidentiality that requires broad protection when information may leave an organisation but narrow definition when similar information moves in the opposite direction raises the same problem. The substance of the principle matters less if its practical meaning depends on who currently benefits from it.

This is why character is difficult to infer from individual incidents and easier to discuss through repeated standards of judgement. A single contradiction may be explained by circumstances, and several contradictions may still have unrelated explanations. What becomes interesting is not repetition of conduct but repetition of the method used to interpret conduct. When favourable ambiguity repeatedly accompanies action and demanding precision repeatedly accompanies accountability, the object of inquiry changes. It becomes less about whether each individual accusation can be won or lost and more about the rules by which inconvenient uncertainty is managed.

For a man who also believed that in sales and war all is allowed, “deny till you die” therefore forms an unusually coherent counterpart. One expression enlarges the room for action while events are still unfolding; the other ensures that, once questions are asked, the cost of reconstructing those events falls largely on somebody else. The system does not require documents to disappear or witnesses to lie. It requires only enough fragmentation, enough alternative interpretation and enough time for certainty to become progressively more expensive.

The unsettling possibility is not that this method succeeds because organisations are uniquely weak. It may succeed because many of the qualities that make organisations responsible also make them vulnerable to it. Serious companies demand evidence, distinguish allegation from fact, separate legal questions from commercial ones and resist conclusions that exceed the record. Those are virtues. Yet the same discipline can unintentionally reward the person who ensures that every important fact can be considered separately and that no single observer retains responsibility for the whole chronology.

This returns the discussion to judgement rather than guilt. Guilt belongs to particular acts and requires the evidentiary standards appropriate to them. Judgement asks a different question: how do we decide what something means before every uncertainty has disappeared? Organisations cannot avoid that question because they make such decisions every day. They extend trust, terminate relationships, approve investments, protect information and assess people without waiting for proof beyond reasonable doubt. The challenge is not to eliminate uncertainty but to recognise when we have begun using different kinds of uncertainty for different people.

Perhaps that is ultimately what makes Mr VAM’s sayings worth remembering. Their significance does not depend on proving that every allegation ever made against him was correct. They are more revealing as a pair of propositions about how human beings can protect a preferred account of themselves. Before judgement, interpretation remains wide enough to permit the action. After judgement begins, interpretation becomes narrow enough to resist the conclusion. Between those two movements lies a large territory in which contradictory facts can coexist without ever becoming a contradiction that has to be resolved.

The final question is therefore not whether denial can preserve uncertainty indefinitely. In many organisations, given sufficient time, it probably can. The more difficult question is what happens to judgement when the standard applied to conduct depends less on the principle itself than on which side of the principle one happens to occupy. That question requires fewer assumptions about motive and considerably less certainty about disputed events. It asks only that we place the standards next to one another and consider whether we would recognise them as the same standard if we did not know whose conduct they were being used to judge.