thoughtglue

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Clive Thompson recently published an article entitled The See-through CEO, where he discusses the notion of radical transparency. For those of you unfamiliar with the notion, it’s an extremely empowering way of running your business completely in the open. From the Wikipedia definition:

Radical transparency is a management method where nearly all decision making is carried out publicly.

All draft documents, all arguments for and against a proposal, the decisions about the decision making process itself, and all final decisions, are made publicly and remain publicly archived. #

While this approach to business may be anathema to many businesses, for knowledge workers and their leaders, working this way can and does make for rich environments where the open sharing of information functions at the core of everything that happens. And it’s no longer an approach for “out there” organisations.
CIO Magazine has discussed the notion of radical transparency in an interview with British Telecom’s CIO of global services, JP Rangaswami. JP is unquestionably a CIO of a very different flavor. Visionary perhaps. He waxes lyrical on cluetrained markets, information control and letting go, Web 2.0 in business, open source and shallow bugs, customer enablement, collaborative environments, radical transparency and his credo for delivering empowerment to business through openness.
Seeing this sort of approach to business given profile in mainstream media is encouraging. It suggests that a groundswell is taking place in business and that approaches that will enable real Knowledge Worker 2.0 work to take place far more easily.