The issue of personal information has been muddled with the opportunity for corporations to become more transparent. To be sure, as I wrote almost a decade ago in The Naked Corporation (co-author David Ticoll), firms can gain huge benefits from sharing pertinent information with customers, employees and other stakeholders. Corporate secrecy is highly overrated and increasingly companies will become more open in many areas — simply to perform better.
We argued in the book that largely because of the arrival of the Internet, transparency is a powerful new force in business. People everywhere have at their fingertips the most powerful tool ever for finding out what’s really going on and informing others. Customers can evaluate the worth of products and services at levels not possible before. Employees share formerly secret information about corporate strategy, management and challenges. To collaborate effectively, companies and their business partners have no choice but to share intimate knowledge. Powerful institutional investors are developing x-ray vision. Finally, in a world of instant communications, whistleblowers, inquisitive media and googling, citizens and communities routinely put firms under the microscope.
Overall this is a positive development. Whether you’re a government or company, when you’re increasingly naked, fitness is no longer optional. Transparency will force you to get buff. And if you are fit, you can open the kimono about your organization and when you do good things can happen. Appropriate transparency drops transaction and collaboration costs. It increases loyalty and trust. It speeds up the metabolism of collaboration and contributes to organizational performance.
This is not to say companies should share all their secrets. There are many areas where secrecy pays off, from your business strategy to your product release plans. But increasingly there are many areas where companies can “undress for success.”
The advocates of personal openness, however, err in thinking the same principles should apply to individuals. Corporations are legal entities that society allows to be created and tasks them to achieve certain societal objectives. They benefit enormously from the privilege of limited liability that society extends to them. As such, they have obligations to us, including being appropriately transparent.
Individuals have no such obligations. We abhor institutions that are secretive. But we have and should continue to respect individuals who are “very private persons.”
Yes, when companies become transparent they also may find themselves releasing personal information such as the compensation levels of corporate management. But senior executives control the institution and as such are not simply private individuals. In their corporate capacity they have a social obligation to reveal some personal information. This goes with the job, as it should.
Conversely they have an obligation to fiercely protect the privacy of their employees, customers and other stakeholders. Unfortunately the debate about personal “openness” has obscured and muddled these important differences.
As the new movement for “personal openness” grows there is a bizarre new danger that people who are “private” become stigmatized. “We know nothing about her vacation location.” “He refuses to publish his DNA sequencing.” “What are they hiding?”
Personally, when it comes to each of us as individuals, I think we all need a balance between the public and private. Just as the complete loner and hermit lifestyle is not optimal (we all need and benefit from human interaction and relationships) so being a completely public person undermines one essence of what it is to be human — to be private, reserved and discreet.
Develop and implement your own personal privacy strategy. When you share, consider the benefits. But realize that withholding most information about you is in your interests: there are many “bad actors” who would misuse it. Privacy is important to the formation and maintenance of human relationships, reputation trust and even “the self” and its presentation in everyday life. Society lacks the laws and norms to protect you from companies being invasive or manipulative. And don’t assume governments are benevolent: we may be harmed in absentia by unknown public and private bureaucracies having access to our personal data — perhaps the targets of injurious decisions and discrimination and we will never really know what or why.
By all means, be as open as you want but realize that with openness can come vulnerabilities, especially for your children. And as the expression goes, “Discretion is the better part of valour” meaning that it makes sense to be careful in the face of unintended consequences and risks.
Original Article
Source: the star
Author: Don Tapscott
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