Given the push back I get when I suggest thinking about why we keep salary figures secret, I wonder what the reaction will be to the piece in the October Harvard Business Review where Dave Balter, CEO of BzzAgent describes his approach to what he calls "radical corporate transparency." (By the way, I love the push back. Keep it coming! It helps me to deepen my thinking and makes for good conversation.)

Balter talks mostly about corporate blogging and sharing more than the conventional wisdom would deem prudent, like sharing internal sales presentations, or when one of the employees shared in a blog that he  thought the boss might be cheap (because he didn't pick immediately pick up the tab for lunch). I love Balter's comment about the sales presentations: "If a competitor wants to see our slides, so what?"

I love the "so what" question. That was really my intention in raising the salary thing–not that you MUST release all your salary information, but that you should know why and that you should take a good hard look at some of the assumptions you have about the pros and cons. When the status quo becomes so ingrained you won't even question it, then we've got a problem. Balter's rationale for being radically transparent:

There is that pesky myth of control again. Sometimes the underlying thought process has flaws, which results in tactics that don't work, even though they seem to "make sense" (e.g., controlling information flow). I also like his experimental approach. He goes in not exactly knowing how things will turn out, but he learns along the way. His current experiment is with office space. An executive's office opened up, so he made it available a week at a time to ANYONE in the organization. He's now looking at how offices impact communication and motivation.