I was recently asked to comment about Transparency and two concepts came to my mind.
They don’t trust us, be transparent to build trust
Firstly your average person has an extremely low trust of companies. According to a recent BBC Mori poll (and to a number of other similar polls) professors, doctors and teachers are the most trusted with around 80% trust levels by your average person, whilst business leaders feature amongst the lowest close to politicians with your average person (and probably your consumers, providers or investors) trusting business leaders at just over 20% levels!
So transparency I therefore see as a means to regain that trust, which is of course fundamental to doing business but also to convincing others to join us, if we are in a quest to also create meaningful impact.
It seems that despite our best intentions, our most recent beautiful and meaningful marketing campaign, is not having much impact at all, almost a waste of money and effort, unless a transparent behaviour allows people to actually see what is behind those words and witness our coherent actions.
We are all in the shop window, make sure people see authenticity
