Innovation + Responsibility

First I must make the disclosure that the term radical transparency is not mine - I first came across it a few months ago on Chris Anderson's blog (he's the editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine; others may know him better as the guy who came up with "the long tail" concept). And next month's issue of Wired Magazine will feature a cover story about this idea (see this blog for more background on that).

Since Sun is generally a company that believes in transparency, what with more than 4000 unfiltered employee blogs (including our CEO and General Counsel!); and since our CSR and Eco Responsibility initiatives place importance on transparency, this was of particular interest to our team.

So, I cold-emailed (is that a term?) Chris and asked if he would meet with me to brainstorm about radical transparency and the corporation. Thrillingly, he agreed! So, we scheduled an appointment for Monday, March 12 (incidentally, I also had a call with Scott McNealy that day - the most productive three-minute call I have ever participated in! Anyway, these two meetings on this one day made it a pretty cool day for me. One of those, "I have a cool job!" days).

So I went to the Wired offices on 3rd Street in San Francisco and Chris and I sat at the table in his office and got to chatting. Mainly I was interested in his ideas about applying the notion of "radical transparency" to a public corporation, which is often inhibited by regulations, forward-looking statements, etc. We talked a bit about looking at transparency in two ways - internal transparency and external transparency. This is a different way for me to look at this because I come from the school of thought that anything internal is external. With the exception of some legal communications, I think that if you expose something to an internal audience you ought to be prepared to expose it to an external audience. Yahoo's "peanut butter memo" is a good example of why I think this.

But are there ways to apply radical transparency internally that may not even be relevant externally? What if we put our corporate code of ethics into a wiki or some other kind of tool and let Sun employees hack it? We don't have to make all the recommended changes, but we get their feedback and perspectives. And then the code itself is more relevant because employees have a hand in creating it. I like this idea. A lot. Not sure anyone would go for it but I think I am going to raise it and see what people say.

After my meeting with Chris I got to thinking about other ways to be radically transparent, specifically with respect to my job running Sun's Corporate Social Responsibility program. I was thinking: What if we put our CSR report online internally and asked employees to have at it? Again, they wouldn't actually get to edit it, but they could give input on it, provide proof points and anecdotes to bring it to life, and hold us accountable when things are unclear or just don't seem quite right. I am trying to find out if there is some kind of Web 2.0 application out there that would allow for this. Stay tuned!

Chris and I also talked about the notion of employee blogging. Mid-conversation, he got up and decided to check out some of our employee blogs. First stop: Dave Douglas' "Eco Notes." And as he scrolled through the site he gave me feedback and suggestions for how to make it better, more user-friendly, more transparent. It was great (I have since forwarded these comments to the marketing folks!). He did like my blog (how's that for self-promotion), mainly because he said my tone was quite candid, which is the value in being able to blog without a corporate filter.

At the end of our chat Chris gave me a draft, bound copy of the next issue of Wired, the one with the radical transparency cover story. I had to promise not to do anything with it until it came out on newsstands in a couple of weeks. I am telling you, it was burning a hole in my bag on the way home! I wanted to badly to take it out and read it on the bus ride home (and I admit, part of me wanted to just look cool with my unpublished magazine!). But I didn't. Instead I laid in bed that night before going to sleep and read it cover to cover. When my issue of Wired comes in the mail next week I will probably geek out and do a side by side comparison of the two to see what, if anything, is different.