[shorbaji]

The debate of more vs. less transparency is not trivial. Regulatory and competitive considerations make this difficult. Sometimes it is simply human nature to be secretive - particularly when it comes to bad news.

The article focuses on transparency between management and employees. Transparency with customers and with the public is at least equally interesting.

A company can benefit from transparency. Heroku, for example, are transparent with their downtime (e.g. status.heroku.com). Another example is the case of AirBnB and the EJ debacle. Once AirBnB openly acknowledged that safety/security is a concern for landlords it adapted by rolling out an improved product (guarantees, safety features, etc).

Both of these are great examples of transparency at the core impacting the product and how it is marketed. These products are more valuable and more competitive because of transparency. Certainly this adds to revenues and likely the bottom line as well.

AirBnB could have adopted this approach earlier. So, the lack of transparency can be missed opportunity.