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Throwing Stones

In practice transparency means that you can see the operating decisions a business makes. You can see the consequences in the market. You can see the implications for public opinion. You can see all sorts of stuff.

As is the case with most things, there are pros and cons.

The pros are pretty obvious. Transparency makes a more level playing field for stakeholders. Employees, potential employees, investors, suppliers and various forms of analyst/critic have all had to rely on management for their information Spin, the revered art of instantly converting lemons into lemonade, was the rule in those communications. All news was good. It required investigative skills to see beyond the company line.

A Transparent world is vastly more human. All news isn't good. Mistakes get made. Increased intimacy with stakeholders comes at the expense of modesty and inflated expectations. When every transaction is public, it turns out that the players all have feet of clay.

Again, this has the very positive effect of leveling the playing field. Effective job hunters scavenge the Vault, F***edCompany, Jobster and a thousand other water coolers for the real skinny on their targets. So do salespeople, investors and the firms own employees. (For an interesting move, see the story about TechCrunch's acquisition of F***edCompany)

The cons are somewhat more interesting.

Just because you can see something does not mean that you understand it. New levels of visibility expose virginal eyes to sights that once were the privy of a few very experienced hands. Pretty much no one who hasn't been on the decision making side of a layoff understands what that's like. As they say in Politics, the real operations are like a sausage factory and you simply don't want to see it. The same hholds true for a large number of processes that sound simple in theory but in practice involve rich complexity.

So, radical transparency opens you and your shop to criticism from under experienced bystanders. Interestingly, that's always been big management's perception of the press in general. The question for business leaders is not whether to run around responding to every criticism leveled at you or your firm. Rather, the question has to do with the relevance of the audience and the importance of the critic. Do they matter?

Transparency is here to stay. So is the fact that human beings make mistakes. Whether or not we learn from them is what's important.

John Sumser © TwoColorHat. All Rights Reserved.
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Presentation from John Sumser, Recruiting Is A Conversation is available for download.

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