{"id":155,"date":"2005-11-11T09:06:07","date_gmt":"2005-11-11T16:06:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=155"},"modified":"2005-11-11T09:06:07","modified_gmt":"2005-11-11T16:06:07","slug":"secrets_and_lie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=155","title":{"rendered":"Secrets and lies"},"content":{"rendered":"

As Apple’s designers and engineers toiled away at creating an iPod that could play video, Steve Jobs kept telling reporters<\/a> that a video iPod was a dumb idea. Even in late September, a couple of weeks before the video iPod’s unveiling, he was saying<\/a> “that the market isn\u2019t yet right for personal video devices.” So is Steve Jobs a big fat liar? No, he’s a smart businessman.<\/p>\n

“Transparency” is a big buzzword these days. To succeed in today’s interconnected world, the common wisdom says, you need to let it all hang out – expose your data, expose your processes, expose your plans. One prominent management consultant’s message, according to CIO Insight<\/a> magazine, boils down to “bare it all and share it all.” Call it the slut strategy.<\/p>\n

Now, there’s a lot to be said for transparency, and for modular processes. But it’s easy to go too far – to make your company so transparent, so connectable, that you turn your entire business into an easily copied (and easily discarded) commodity. Even in the Internet Age, a company’s competitive advantage still hinges on what, to outsiders, remains hidden, obscure, and hard to replicate. Google has made a lot of its technology transparent, but the essence of the company, the source of its advantage, remains opaque.<\/p>\n

Openness and honesty are good things. But let’s not lose sight of the enduring power of secrets and lies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As Apple’s designers and engineers toiled away at creating an iPod that could play video, Steve Jobs kept telling reporters that a video iPod was a dumb idea. Even in late September, a couple of weeks before the video iPod’s unveiling, he was saying “that the market isn\u2019t yet right for personal video devices.” So […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=155"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}