
The Case for Startups to Make Transparency the Top Priority - cryptoz
http://firstround.com/review/the-case-for-startups-to-make-radical-transparency-the-top-priority/
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pbreit
I'm all for transparency but "radical" doesn't seem prudent to me. I would
never advocate transparency for transparency's sake. And I can think of other
more important things such as delighting customers and staying in business
(redundant since that's necessary to delight customers).

~~~
swombat
I'd disagree, at least as far as internal transparency is concerned. My
experience in founding and running GrantTree for the last 5 years has been
that total internal transparency of all business data (including the finances
and individual transactions) has huge benefits in terms of both building trust
between staff and the company, and in terms of forcing the company to face
important issues and solve them properly rather than "hack" a solution via
secret pay raises and bonuses.

If you want to build the kind of company where people stay because they love
to work there, rather than the kind of company where people stay because
they're getting paid a lot, I would say that total internal transparency is
essential.

As far as external transparency goes, that is more thorny but I think a strong
commitment to transparency helps there too. Customers don't want you to
pretend you're perfect. Shit happens in business. Things go wrong. Customers
want to know that when shit inevitably goes wrong, you'll own up to it, take
responsibility, and fix things competently. If you have a habit of pretending
everything's ok when it's not, well, that's a bad sign. If, on the other hand,
you're noticeably transparent about your business, that's a good sign to
customers that this will carry over when shit happens.

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ggchappell
The article seems to confuse management's transparency to employees with a
company's transparency to the public. These are very different things, and I
think one can make a good case for pursuing the former assiduously, while
being cautious with the latter.

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swombat
Interesting article, but I'm sad to observe that Bellows stopped short of
actually implementing his vision of transparency, in a number of ways. If he's
reading this, I'd suggest having a wander through my articles at
[http://danieltenner.com/open-cultures](http://danieltenner.com/open-cultures)
and seeing if some ideas there are interesting...

Here's an example:

> Take compensation information, for example. At Yesware, that’s kept strictly
> private. Not only does Bellows feel his employees are entitled to discretion
> around what they earn, he also knows that it’s in the company’s best
> interest to avoid any negative feelings around discrepancies. Moreover,
> there’s nothing to be gained from sharing that information; it doesn’t boost
> trust, for example, or help team members assume more responsibility.

I strongly disagree with this. There is a _lot_ to be gained by sharing pay
information openly. Compensation is indeed a very emotional topic, and it's
one where unfairness naturally ends up accumulating if it's allowed to be
secret. If you don't know exactly how much everyone in your company is being
paid, you can bet your bottom dollar that there's some dodgy deals going on,
with people being given extra raises and bonuses to make up for various issues
in the organisation. And you can probably also safely assume that there's a
gender pay gap.

Conversely, when everyone can see exactly how much everyone else is being
paid, instead of having unfairness baked into the system you have open, often
heated, passionate, and engaged discussions about how to fix the system to
keep it fair. This is of course impossible: fairness is in the eye of the
beholder; everyone has a different definition of fairness when it comes to
compensation. So it's not possible to achieve! And so the discussion moves on
to a meta level: how to be emotionally mature about this divergence of
definition and design a system where everyone is happy with whatever
compromises have been made around fairness.

Of course, this takes a lot more emotional maturity from people. It demands
this of them. And so it pushes the company forwards in terms of personal
growth - which is one of Bellows' stated aims and a Yesware company value.

I'd advise Yesware to embrace total internal transparency. It'll be hard.
It'll be chaotic. But it'll push you further than you can possibly get without
it.

Here's another example:

> Another transparency pitfall to look out for is the “too many cooks in the
> kitchen” scenario — a common problem, Bellows notes, once a company grows
> past five or ten people. If everyone has the same information, people begin
> to feel entitled to weigh in anytime, even on decisions well outside their
> qualifications. When that happens, keep clear boundaries.

Why be worried about people weighing in? It's only from a consensus mindset
that you worry about too many people weighing in. If those people are only a
little bit emotionally mature they know that ultimately the decision maker
will be the one making the decision and that all they're doing is providing
some input. Why does that need to feel threatening?

Too many cooks indicates that Yesware may have experimented with a consensus-
based decision process and, quite rightly, found that it doesn't work. There
are other decision models, like the fairly well known Advice Process (which
can also work in hierarchical organisations -
[http://danieltenner.com/2014/11/06/the-advice-process-
defini...](http://danieltenner.com/2014/11/06/the-advice-process-definition-
and-usage-tips/) ) which remove this problem by making sure that each decision
has exactly one cook.

Of course, the Advice Process is, like most important things, deceptively
simple, and takes discipline and thought to implement correctly.

Company culture is hard. Let's go shopping.

~~~
sokoloff
People weighing in on topics outside their expertise or in excess of what you
need to make a good decision is a drain on the company, for both people
providing input and those receiving it.

Take a software engineer weighing in on a legal matter (or vice-versa). What's
productive for the end-customer in that interaction, even if the right expert
still has the final say?

~~~
swombat
Good ideas often come from unexpected places. "Weighing in" makes it sound
like some sort of ponderous, heavy process. It's just someone offering their
advice. The expert is free to decide against that advice!

