The Truth Is, the Truth Hurts

I was 19 years old when I got my first real job, at International Harvester. I was amazed at how dishonest life was. My job was to talk to production managers around the country and to help coordinate their efforts. If one plant had a surplus of components and another plant had a shortage, I tried to reconcile the situation. Little did I know that plant managers at Harvester never told the truth - it was an unwritten rule. Why risk shutting down your assembly line by shipping components somewhere else? In my youthful naivete, I always gave honest counts. And over time, more and more senior people would call me - not because I was so smart but because I didn't lie. My visibility inside the company got higher and higher, simply because I told the truth.

That's why SRC embraces open-book management. We are building a company in which everyone tells the truth every day - not because everyone is honest but because everyone has access to the same information: operating metrics, financial data, valuation estimates. The more people understand what's really going in their company, the more eager they are to help solve its problems. Information isn't power. It's a burden. Share information, and you share the burdens of leadership as well.

SRC is much celebrated for its practice of open-book management. Jack Stack is the author of The Great Game of Business (Doubleday/ Currency, 1992).

Brad Blanton
President
Radical Honesty network
Stanley, Virginia
sparrowh@shentel.net

Tell the truth. All the time. About everything. What's the alternative to radical honesty? Waste. Wasted time, wasted money, wasted possibilities - a wasted life.

Sure, the truth hurts. But it inspires too. People spend too much time calculating the risks that come with being honest - and too little time thinking about the rewards. I've been counseling businesspeople for more than 25 years. Only twice have I seen people get fired for speaking their mind. Most people who finally have the difficult conversations that they've been avoiding tell a different story: In the course of an hour, they were fired twice, they quit twice, but eventually they left the room with their position intact. And within a month, they had a promotion and a raise.

Most leaders want honest communication - even if the message isn't something they want to hear. Radical honesty is addictive. Once people discover the truth, they fall in love with it.

Brad Blanton is the author of Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth (Dell, 1996) and founder of the Radical Honesty Network (www.radicalhonesty.com).

Mark Cuban
President and Cofounder
AudioNet
Dallas, Texas
mcuban@audionet.com

Let's be honest: we lie, and our colleagues lie to us. That's how human beings operate. People prefer to tell other people what they want to hear. I don't worry very much about whether everything I hear in a meeting or read in an email is the unvarnished truth. I don't need perfect people. I need successful people - people who can think for themselves and get the job done. And if they need to tell a little white lie once in a while, well, I can live with that.

Now, there are a few areas where absolute truth is mandatory: When it comes to customer service, never tell me even a little white lie. But in general, I care more about the big picture: Are we being honest with ourselves about the condition and course of the company? I don't want private, closed-door meetings. That's why our headquarters is one big open space. We don't have secretaries - and my own office doesn't even have enough room for somebody else to sit in it! If we're honest about the big things, the little things will take care of themselves, even if that means telling an occasional white lie.

AudioNet broadcasts a range of events - from rock concerts to trade shows - over the Internet. It was founded in 1995 and is one of the Web's most highly trafficked sites.

Christie Hefner
Chairman and CEO
Playboy Enterprises Inc.
Chicago, Illinois

Playboy has six different but related businesses: publishing, entertainment, catalogs, product licensing, new media, and gaming. Our success depends on how quickly and honestly people in these businesses share what they know with headquarters and with one another. We work hard to fill the company with articulate and opinionated people who have no trouble telling it like it is. In fact, we recently initiated two projects designed to let people tell those of us in senior management how well we're doing our job.