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By Root 1629 0

than just our bottom line, Alan wants to be more than just a money man. The opening I extended allowed him to see an opportunity to pursue his own journey of significance, to share his knowledge and wisdom in a more substantive way. Instead of just showing him a bright shiny wheel, I showed myself as a gear, with powerful teeth but also with spaces into which he could intermesh. My transparency gave him a vision of what we could accomplish together in one machine, to create an intimate collaboration that had the potential to set off an upward spiral of meaningful endeavor. Not long after, Alan and Polaris did invest in LRN, and I asked him to sit on our corporate board, where he is now an integral part of who we are.

What does it mean to be truthful? To be open? To act from principle rather than for a desired effect? For one thing, it’s simpler. As Mark Twain once wrote, “If you tell the truth you don’t have to remember anything.”41 More importantly, in a world accustomed to falsehood and deception, in which daily we receive hundreds of commercial messages inveigling us to one act or another, transparency and forthrightness can be tremendously refreshing. No one can copy your HOWS, and within the wide spectrum of human behavior, the HOW of active interpersonal transparency can become a powerful differentiator.

DOING TRANSPARENCY

The Certainty Gap does not just describe a condition of the world; it also describes our relationship with those around us in business. There is a Certainty Gap between people, too. Business relationships are formal relationships, and just like companies use programs or advertising as formal layers between themselves and their market, people rely on personal surrogates and proxies in their dealings with others each day. When a buyer in a negotiation tells a potential vendor, “We’re talking to your competitors,” when it isn’t true, the buyer is using the illusion of false action to secure a better price. When a boss says, “Get it to me by four o’clock,” without sharing the reasons and benefits of the action, the boss is relying on the proxy of his or her position to get things done. When the world is opaque and you can’t see beyond people’s personal proxies, there is a Certainty Gap in your interactions with them. But when active transparency is in the room and people show you what’s behind the curtain, it raises the floor, the Gap is smaller, and the conditions that breed the trust you need to fill it rush in. The conditions of general uncertainty in the world make transparency—both technological when you can turn it to your favor and interpersonal when you can bring it to the table—into one of the most powerful HOWS there is.

CHAPTER 8

Trust

For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest

that holds human associations together. Our friends

seldom profit us but they make us feel safe.

—H. L. Mencken

A few years ago, in the early days of the blogging phenomenon, a New York-based web designer named Jason Kottke told a fascinating story on his blog, Kottke.org, about his experience with a coffee-and-doughnuts street vendor he called Ralph.

“I stepped up to the window, ordered a glazed donut (75 cents),” Kottke writes, “and when he handed it to me, I handed a dollar bill back through the window. Ralph motioned to the pile of change scattered on the counter and hurried on to the next customer, yelling ‘Next!’ over my shoulder. I put the bill down and grabbed a quarter from the pile.” Kottke was intrigued by this behavior, so he decided to investigate. “I walked a few steps away and turned around to watch the interaction between this business and its customers. For five minutes, everyone either threw down exact change or made their own change without any notice from Ralph; he was just too busy pouring coffee or retrieving crullers to pay any attention to the money situation.”1

As he observed and considered what may be gained or lost by this unusual policy, Kottke noticed that Ralph was serving an extraordinary number of customers. To confirm this suspicion, he went