SAY YOU ARE SORRY
Posted on August 31, 2008 - Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
Fear of exposure is a real concern in a transparent world. Transparency is not just a WHAT, however, something that happens to you; it is a HOW that any group or individual can embrace and master.
To see how this can work, let me say, “I’m sorry.”
are difficult words to say, especially in a business context. [...]
THE MARKET DEFINES YOU (3)
Posted on August 30, 2008 - Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
Mass media advertising is losing its effectiveness because people don’t believe it (the information age has given them ample access to objective facts that disprove advertising claims), and, more important, they just don’t need it as much anymore to make buying decisions. Gallup’s 2005 annual governance survey reported that “[Only] half of Americans say they [...]
Read More..>>THE MARKET DEFINES YOU (2)
Posted on August 29, 2008 - Filed Under Uncategorized | Comments Off
This trend is pervading other areas of society as well. Yelp, a web site that touts “Real People. Real Reviews,” is building a community of nonprofessional reviewers who log on and share their immediate impressions of everything from hot dog stands to five-star restaurants to corner hardware stores. When it launched in San Francisco in [...]
Read More..>>THE MARKET DEFINES YOU
Posted on August 28, 2008 - Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
Nowhere in the internetworked world is our changing relationship to proxies and surrogates better illuminated than in the world of advertising. Advertising and marketing are proxies as well, up-front representations of a company’s best effort to reach out to its customers. Back in the early days of radio and television, when advertisers broke free of [...]
Read More..>>ICU, UC ME
Posted on August 27, 2008 - Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
Technological transparency has lifted the veil of proxies and surrogates, leaving individuals and organizations exposed as never before. This new vulnerability has profound ramifications on how we do what we do. In an attempt to quantify the way transparency affects the HOWs of business, Professor James A. Brickley of the William E. Simon Graduate School [...]
Read More..>>BEYOND PROXIES AND SURROGATES (2)
Posted on August 26, 2008 - Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
In the days before information transparency made almost everything easily knowable, all we could really know about a company’s “character” were the programs and procedures that stood as proxies for it. When companies could be fortresses, they had much greater control over what outsiders could see. The walls were high, and it was highly effective [...]
Read More..>>BEYOND PROXIES AND SURROGATES
Posted on August 25, 2008 - Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
I was watching CNN when the jury in the Scott Peterson murder trial, one of the most publicized celebrity trials of the past few years, handed down its death penalty verdict. In the aftermath of the verdict, I happened to catch an interview with one of the jurors. When asked how the jury reached its [...]
Read More..>>Doing Transparency (2)
Posted on August 24, 2008 - Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
Knowledge is power. That old adage is as true today as when philosopher Francis Bacon first said it in the seventeenth century. When knowledge—enabled by this unprecedented access to information— was controllable, those who controlled it accrued power and became leaders. Now that information is virtually uncontrollable, the power has shifted to those who share [...]
Read More..>>Doing Transparency
Posted on August 23, 2008 - Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
For years, the bicycling community considered the locks made by Kryptonite, now a division of Ingersoll Rand, the gold standard in bicycle security. In 2001, Bicycling magazine made its New York 3000 lock an editor’s choice, saying, “The company that invented the U-lock just never quits raising the bar on theft prevention. . . . [...]
Read More..>>INTRODUCTION: HOW WE DO WHAT WE DO (2)
Posted on August 22, 2008 - Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
Any possible collaboration between us could have ended right there, but there were a few powerful forces at work in this small, but common, interaction. The first was the reputation and trust I had built with David over the years. He knew that I placed the highest premium on getting my HOWs right. That reputation [...]
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