One of my favourite business cards, ever, came from my old acquaintance and mentor Victor Niederhoffer. Victor is a professional trader and hedge fund manager; he’s also a blogger, an author, a sceptic, a romantic, a teacher, a philanthropist, a raconteur and many other things besides, facts which are summed up neatly, obliquely and colourfully on his Sam Spade-esque business card which reads:

Victor Niederhoffer

Value created | Ballyhoo deflated | Damsels rescued

I was thinking of this because my friend Rhymer Rigby, knowing I’m an ‘identity guy,’ talked to me whilst researching a piece he wrote for the Financial Times. His article is about how people use business cards to represent themselves. My quoted contribution is meager –

“It’s an opportunity to be expressive and wear your thoughtfulness on your sleeve, and most of the time it’s a missed opportunity,” says Mr Hildreth.

– and I’d like to expand on my thoughts here.

By thoughtfulness I mean, for instance, leaving off the fax machine number. When was the last time you received a fax, or sent one? Yet, when was the last time you tried to ring someone up, got an earful of carrier tone, and realized you dialed the fax number by mistake?

Exactly.

My business card has the following information: name, email address, website URL, mobile phone number, and the three social networks I use most avidly. There’s some personality in the form of my doodles (which I’d been attempting, I think rather unsuccessfully, to incorporate into my corporate identity). I have found oftentimes I give somebody a card and a couple of days later he or she connects to me on LinkedIn or Facebook. The system seems to work.

The same rule applies to business cards, I suppose, as applies to good writing or good conversation: leave out the boring parts.

Postscript: Cheers to Wayne Elise for Tweeting about this post (and for partially inspiring it in some conversations we had last weekend). I could mention that Wayne — who probably doesn’t have actual printed business cards — identifies himself in his email signoff as ‘head honcho’ at Charisma Arts. I find this wonderful. It says exactly what his role is and communicates something of who he his as a person; it also suggests (i.e., communicates indirectly) far more about the company itself than would ‘CEO’ or ‘Founder’ or ‘President’, all of which would be equally descriptively accurate but far less evocative of the kind of outfit Charisma Arts is. Wayne’s title shows, furthermore, how personality can coincide with clarity and amplify it; one wouldn’t be perfectly sure what the ‘President’ did or didn’t do (or even whether her or she was a sole proprietor putting on airs), but if you’re talking to the ‘head honcho’ then you’ll probably guess the score pretty accurately: small and/or informal company closely run by one characterful individual.