The business world loves talking about transparency. Leaders strive for it. Consultants tell them to create a ‘culture of transparency.’ Peddlers of business trends and fads trumpet it. All of them say it’ll open up leadership decisions to more worker input, ’empower’ staff, and so on.
Readers of this blog likely know I roll my eyes at all this stuff. It’s annoying, yes, but it’s also troubling in many (often unintentional) ways. Let’s take a quick look.
Transparency and Business Culture
So, here’s the thing about transparency. We might define it with traits like openness, honesty, and accountability. But people who exemplify these traits in their everyday and working lives don’t need to talk about it. At least not explicitly. They just do it.
We see this pretty clearly in the business world. Companies that run via principles of democratic inclusion don’t crow about ‘transparency.’ And why would they? They bake it into everything they do. They don’t need to draw attention to it because it’s a part of their basic business model. Explicitly so, the case of businesses like democratic member co-ops.
And then we have those other business leaders. Especially – but not exclusively – those in the private, for-profit world. Again, they love talking about transparency. Why? Probably because they’re not very transparent.
