Do You Want to No a Secret?

Even though it wasn't a court-ordered condition of my parole, I was in a meeting recently about business ethics, during which one of my fellow attendees was approaching orgiastic levels in praising a local executive.

"They don't have any secrets at this company!" she exclaimed, bits of foam appearing at the corners of her mouth. "Nobody has private offices! The board doesn't even meet behind closed doors!! It's a no-secrets culture!!!" We all nodded approvingly, satisfied to see that another passenger has climbed on the latest corporate bandwagon.

While the "no-secrets" philosophy is new to corporations, its roots are as old as humans themselves. Humans have long striven to persuade others that they had nothing to hide. Anthropologists say that the waving of a hand began as a way to signify that the waver wasn't carrying a weapon. Same with the handshake. Long before the handshake was a way to say, "I want you to think I'm pleased to meet you," it was a way to say, "Look! My ax hand is not armed!"

The "no-secrets" fad is the latest incarnation of this ancient human instinct. It comes at a time when quite a few companies have been shown to have special kinds of secrets, known technically as "accounting fraud." But the main perceived value seems to be inside companies, where different departments don't always play well together or share information. Some executives have come to believe that this behavior inhibits corporate performance, so they embrace "no secrets" or "transparency" or even, as one company calls it, "radical transparency." Then they leave the office early for a round of golf and direct their assistants to tell callers that they're in a meeting.

Personally, I'm ambivalent about the idea of no secrets. When I worked in public relations for big companies, I learned that there are lots of reasons for secrets: the long-held belief that information is power, the long-standing problem of incompetence, the fear that one's fraud will be detected, the fear that one's abilities will be fully known and, of course, the Internet. Where I live, a finance manager in a county job was using the Internet to send non-county-business-like e-mail to an employee with whom the manager had a non-county-business-like relationship. Instead of talking about, say, performance evaluations, the correspondents would evaluate each other's performance, if you get my drift. Do you think the manager called up his public relations persons and told them about this? Well, if you do, you're not cut out to be a county employee.

Of course, it doesn't do any good not to have any secrets unless you tell everyone you have no secrets, so some companies are trying to make a big deal of their no-secrets modus operandi outside their companies. They think it engenders investor confidence to tell stockholders, potential stockholders, attorneys general, and regulators that they have no secrets. This is the corporate equivalent of volunteering to be frisked before a police officer can even yell "freeze!"

But there are good reasons to have secrets. The best one I can think of is that most of us already have too much information anyway. It's one of everyone's biggest complaints about the workplace: Employees are overloaded with information. It's bad enough even to know that your company has something called "the process excellence team," much less to know what they're doing. Do you really want your staff to know what you spend on flowers for your New York apartment? Or how much golf you really play? Wouldn't you prefer that they continue to think you were genetically cursed with rotting teeth and require multiple dentist visits every week to continue to be able to chew? And if your spouse is a manager for the county, are you sure you want to read those non-county-business e-mails?

So don't count me among the advocates of no secrets. I think it's a charade. And like all things transparent, you can see right through it.

Dan Danbom writes humor for a number of publications. His latest book is "Humor Meets Your Workforce: Make Laughter One of Your Organization's Goals."