It seems easy enough, but it is harder than one might think. From a personal perspective, I am pretty much an open book. If you ask me a question, I will most likely give you an answer (provided that I have one or that I am in a position to give it to you). My philosophy is that if you have enough courage and curiosity to ask me a question, then I should at the very least give you a response.

This seems easy enough in the personal world, but can it carry over to the business world? There has been a lot written recently on businesses that are very transparent and what the benefits are. I think it is something that can carry over to the business world, however I am not convinced that businesses see the advantages to doing so. Most of the “transparency” that you read on corporate blogs, PR releases etc. is not really that transparent, it is a spin on the situation that paints the company in a good light. This may come across as working well, and who knows, it may snowball thousands and thousands of people, but is it the right thing to do? No. It is far more beneficial for the company and it’s customers for the company to tell it like it is, within reason. Obviously there are company secrets that cannot be divulged, but aside from those, companies would be far better off if they were more of an open book.

Imagine the scenario where Company X was about to release a product, but they knew the date was slipping and was going to be a missing a few features that they had promised. If the company keeps a transparent policy, they may get some bad press out of it, but at least their customers knew what was happening and may take it a little easier on them as a result of their transparency. Imagine the flip side, they company keep it guarded that they were slipping their release date and the product was going to come up short on the features. All the while the company is claiming they will meet their date and have an out of the ball park product. When they do finally release the product late and without certain key features, their customers and the media will have a field day with them.

At the end of the day, you are better off being as transparent as you can be with your customers and the media. After all, they are smarter than you think and they can sniff out a fake quickly and will call you out on it.