My standard sign-off in texts and emails has always been “Best, Tony.” Simple. Professional. Warm enough.
During the years I was running UBM TechWeb: a global B2B media, events, and data business that grew to over $300 million in revenue, that sign-off had a problem. I wasn’t always “Best, Tony.” Thanks to iPhone autocorrect, occasionally I was “Beast, Tiny.”
The irony is hard to miss. At 6’5” and 200 pounds, “Tiny” is not a word anyone would use to describe me. And I’ve spent my career building a leadership style and reputation around decisiveness with empathy, clarity with care. Not exactly “Beast” territory.
But here’s what I learned: autocorrect doesn’t lie. It just exposes what you’re actually doing.
The Pressure Cooker
The years of the Beast/Tiny phenomenon were not ordinary years.
The smartphone was rewriting how business got done in real time. At UBM TechWeb, we were simultaneously managing the decline of print, scaling digital, acquiring and globalizing events, including operations in Mumbai, Beijing, and Shanghai. And then the global financial crisis hit, compressing timelines, rerouting capital, and forcing us to rewire the planes while in flight.
I was texting constantly. To direct reports, to global teams, to board members, to partners. From airports, hotel rooms, back-seat rides to meetings. Direction, questions, answers, decisions, all of it compressed into a thumb-typed stream of consciousness. My texts were moving at the speed of the market.
And the market was not waiting for me to proof my sign-off.
The Loneliest Job You’ll Never Fully Explain
Here’s what doesn’t get talked about enough: running a company at that pace, in that environment, is genuinely isolating.
The data on this is striking. Research shows that half of CEOs and senior leaders report experiencing loneliness and isolation, with 61 percent believing it negatively impacts their performance. Senior leaders are twice as likely to report feelings of isolation compared to employees in non-leadership positions.
I lived that statistic without knowing it existed.
The isolation isn’t social, you’re surrounded by people. It’s contextual. As CEO, you’re the one everyone looks to for context. Which means fewer and fewer people can give it to you. Information flows up filtered. Perspective flows up managed. The loneliness experienced by CEOs stems not from a lack of social connections but from the heavy burden of leadership and decision-making; especially during crises, when they look to their board, senior executives, or operational managers and find that even those people are watching what they say.
The faster the market moved, the more I leaned on digital communication to stay connected. The more I leaned on digital, the more isolated my actual thinking became. I was generating output — decisions, direction, responses — without adequate input. A machine running hot with no coolant.
Autocorrect caught what I couldn’t. I was moving too fast. And “Beast, Tiny” was the tell.
The Framework: Three Places the Gap Shows Up
What the Beast/Tiny mistake revealed was a gap, between intent and output. That gap isn’t unique to texts. Under sustained pressure, it shows up across three domains every leader should monitor.
1. Communication: What You Meant to Say vs. What Landed
Speed collapses nuance. Autocorrect made it visible; usually it isn’t.
Most leaders believe they’re communicating clearly under pressure. Research suggests otherwise. Studies on managerial communication consistently find that during high-stress periods, message clarity degrades while message volume increases. A particularly dangerous combination in a global organization where context is already challenged across time zones and cultures.
The discipline: Before sending anything consequential, ask one question: “What will this person do with this?” Not what you meant. What they’ll do. That five-second check is the equivalent of proofreading your texts. It costs nothing. The cost of skipping it compounds.
2. Decisions: What You Intended to Signal vs. What the Organization Heard
Fast-moving leaders often experience themselves as decisive. Their organizations often experience them as reactive, and the difference is enormous.
A decisive decision has visible reasoning. A reactive decision has visible urgency. When you’re operating in crisis mode, urgency can masquerade as clarity. People execute, but they execute on what they inferred, not what you intended.
Former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy noted that loneliness “reduces task performance, limits creativity, and impairs other aspects of executive function such as reasoning and decision making.” When isolation compounds velocity, the decisions that feel sharpest may actually be the least examined.
The discipline: After significant decisions, do a 24-hour check. Not to reverse, but to listen for what the organization is doing with what you said. If the actions don’t match the intent, the gap is yours to close.
3. Presence: Who You Meant to Be in the Room vs. Who Actually Showed Up
This is the hardest one.
At speed, leadership presence defaults. You stop showing up intentionally and start showing up habitually, running on pattern, not purpose. The “Beast” isn’t aggressive. The Beast is the unexamined version of you, operating on autopilot while you manage a hundred other inputs.
Fewer peers, high external expectations, and rare honest feedback make it difficult to openly discuss one’s limitations. Most CEOs don’t get told when their presence has shifted. They find out later; in an exit interview, a board conversation, a candid moment from a trusted advisor, that people had been reading a version of them they hadn’t intended to project.
The discipline: Build at least one feedback loop that is structurally honest, a peer, an executive coach, a trusted board member, someone whose job is not to manage your reaction. The Beast/Tiny moment happened because someone on my team felt comfortable enough to laugh about it with me. That comfort didn’t happen by accident.
What “Beast, Tiny” Actually Fixed
When people caught the autocorrect mistake, they loved it. Initially I was embarrassed. Then I realized what it was doing: it created permission to be human.
“Beast, Tiny” broke the artifice of the relentlessly-in-command CEO. It reminded my team — and honestly, reminded me — that the person sending these texts was a human being making judgment calls under real pressure, not an oracle issuing pronouncements from on high.
The forcing function wasn’t just proofreading my sign-offs. It was learning to pause before I communicated, before I decided, before I walked into a room. Not slower, more deliberate. The difference matters.
The market was moving at autocorrect speed. Leadership couldn’t.
The Test You Can Apply Today
I now think of the Beast/Tiny Test as a simple diagnostic leaders can run in three moments:
* Before you send: Does this say what I mean, or what I typed?
* After your decision: Is the organization moving the way I intended, or the way they interpreted?
* Before you enter the room: Am I showing up on purpose, or on pattern?
Three questions. Seconds each. The cost of skipping them is what autocorrect was trying to tell me.
Best,
Tony
The views expressed in Uphoff on Media are entirely my own. They don’t represent the opinions of any company I’ve led, any board I’ve sat on, or any investor who’s had the pleasure of debating strategy with me over the years. If something I write here sounds brilliant, I’ll take full credit. If it turns out to be wrong, I was clearly misquoted by myself.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tonyuphoff.substack.com
