Five Ideas: Transparency
Expert advice on getting —and giving— a clear picture of your business.
October 2008
"It's so easy for people to do fact-checking on you. Can you really say, 'We're the best that's out there'? Nobody's going to buy that. They want evidence."—Forrester Research principal analysts Charlene Li, author of Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies
"Not showing what you're doing is simply not accepted anymore. Customers want to know type of business they are dealing with. If you don't integrate your value chain, at one moment you'll be shut out. Regulators simply demand the information they require. And competitors who did get transparency right will overtake you left and right." —Frank Buytendijk, VP of Enterprise Performance Management
:"I wrote a book on transparency a few years ago called The Naked Corporation. The idea is that you are going to be naked as a company, so you have to get buff. When you are buff, transparency is your friend. By being transparent you build trust and drop collaboration costs." —Don Tapsoctt, founder and chief executive of New Paradigm
"People at the top of the organization have to set the tone. Day in and day out, executives must demonstrate to their employees that they are open to bad news, that they are listening to people who have important news, and that people are not going to be punished when they bring ideas or criticism—or even bad news—forward. It takes a tremendous amount of trust before people are really willing to speak up. "—James O'Toole, the Daniels Distinguished Professor of Business Ethics at the University of Denver's Daniels College of Business
"Oracle actually has a strong history of responding to customer feedback. What better way to illustrate our developing commitment to transparency, than to replace our standard brochureware with a social media experience?
'Particpate With Oracle' is designed to make these conversations much more transparent, as well as to broaden the process beyond the technical end-user community, where it traditionally has lived."—Justin Kestlyn,
OTN Editor-in-Chief
