Transparency may be a bridge too far

About 400 years ago, I was walking back to my DC hotel with a jaded Wall Street Journal reporter and a new-to-covering-business-issues tech reporter. We’d been at dinner and drinks with about a dozen reporters and PR peeps covering US v Microsoft.

As we were gossiping about the testimony in court that day, the younger reporter burst out in frustration: “Why don't executives tell the truth?” The WSJ reporter and I just laughed.

In our business culture, total transparency invites an avalanche of lawsuits, justified or not. There are stacks of legitimate reasons an executive cannot blab everything they know in public.

But corporate leaders must say and do what they can to preserve bonds with employees, customers, partners, investors, and every other vital audience.

Every PR person who’s been trapped in a conference room with lawyers at 1:30 a.m. arguing over each word choice feels the pain of straddling these competing imperatives.

Transparency isn’t the right metric. But I believe that integrity and responsibility are.

Integrity = alignment between words and visible reality.

Responsibility = you say what you can say when you can say it, clearly, with dignity.

To wit:
You can decline to discuss restructuring. But you don’t say to your team "our people are our greatest asset" and then lay off twenty percent of them four days later.
You can say you’re engaged in a company-wide reboot and will share news next quarter. You don’t claim AI agent market leadership when all you have is vaporware.

No matter how intense the storm, it’s magnificent to watch inspired communications leaders steer their organizations through the Scylla and Charybdis of competing imperatives to safe, credible shores.

After that intense work is done, I love helping executives prepare to deliver the great messages of integrity and responsibility their communications leaders and lawyers built together.