Transparency vs. Authenticity
After writing the last post, I started thinking of the idea of transparency.
The idea of transparency seems to be taking off right now. The cluetrain notions of:
- Companies need to lighten up and take themselves less seriously. They need to get a sense of humor.
- Getting a sense of humor does not mean putting some jokes on the corporate web site. Rather, it requires big values, a little humility, straight talk, and a genuine point of view.
- Companies attempting to “position” themselves need to take a position. Optimally, it should relate to something their market actually cares about.
- Companies need to come down from their Ivory Towers and talk to the people with whom they hope to create relationships.
- We want access to your corporate information, to your plans and strategies, your best thinking, your genuine knowledge. We will not settle for the 4-color brochure, for web sites chock-a-block with eye candy but lacking any substance.
CEOs are blogging. Companies are encouraging employees to get their ideas out there without first running posts through editors and the brand police. But to me, the question is this: is transparency authentic?
Like everything else, I think the answer is sometimes yes, sometimes no.
Some companies are great at transparency. But only when secrecy isn’t an inherent mandate. For example, if your business only exists today because your competitors don’t have access to your secret magic, how can you be entirely transparent? The act of giving up the secret to be authentic to the market is the very act that kills your business. So sure, that may be an extreme example, but it’s something to think about.
Which brings me to my next point: is authentic transparency even possible for any web service startup? It just seems like the rate at which clones pop up to water down anything cool makes paranoia justifiable. Every digg has a reddit. Every myspace has a facebook. Every this has a this killer.
But maybe this idea of transparency is different from my interpretation. Maybe it means that companies are reactively honest when the market asks questions, but that doesn’t feel right. To me, transparency feels like an all-or-nothing proposition. It seems like it’s a decision to proactively initiate a discussion with a market to build trust and a relationship rather than just admitting the truth when pressured.
So how can startups reconcile guarding secrets with being honest? With potential competitors watching, how do you know what you should say to be authentic to the market while still trying to hold on to your competitive value?
File this under “Nathan’s giant bin of rambling questions without any answers whatsoever.” That bin is getting pretty full.
Filed under: blogging, shameless self promotion, transparency
Authenticity as you suggest is a problem for many businesses. I would suggest that the reason for this is that many of them are grounded in and thrive only in an inauthentic climate. Which is of course why they cannot be transparent until questioned and then I suspect the transparency is pretty much faked.
The only way to true authenticity is when it is based on an individuals core, unique quality, a quality shared by no other. Then a business has a truly unique niche that another cannot duplicate because they will never possess the core specifics necessary. It is possible to build these intrinsics into a company by using those qualities possessed by the founders and managers of a company.
A company has to take on an authentic persona of its own which is understood and lived by its personnel, before it can become truly, transparently authentic.