Transparency in business: is it possible?

Wired journalist Fred Vogelstein (Fred Vogelstein) recently learned that at least one serious organization has a detailed dossier on it. But, judging by the complete bewilderment of an article about this, he certainly did not expect that this organization was Microsoft.

In recent days, Fred has been working on a large article about a new project of Channel 9 , a video blog that tells the public about working at Microsoft, about the people and events taking place in the company. After taking several interviews with his manager and two other members of the team, Vogelstine, even unaware of the scale of the observation vehicle built over him, quietly collected the accumulated material in parts, sitting in the editorial office.

But the letter that fell in his mailbox for a long time knocked the journalist out of the creative process. The volume of the text (pdf, 310 Kb) on 13 pages contained detailed recommendations on how Microsoft employees should talk with Fred: what to focus on, how to get away from tricky questions that he will surely ask, how to direct his thoughts to company side. In addition, the document contained the present dossier, with a brief biography and an exhaustive description of Vogelstin's personal and professional qualities: his communication patterns, level of education, writing methods, writing style, and information of interest.
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This report for Microsoft was compiled by the Waggener Edstrom PR agency, which has long been firmly established in the public relations services market. Among his customers, besides the Redmond giant, there are brands such as Master Card and T-Mobile. But even such mastodons make mistakes: an internal document intended for a narrow circle of people was sent to Vogelstain by mistake, which was stated to the journalist in the agency itself.

Fred admits that there is nothing surprising in the very fact that there is a file on him: he has been working as a journalist for over 20 years, wrote for Fortune and other business publications, and earned fame for a rather sharp and sensationalist. But what angered him was the fact that they were tried to be manipulated (as he admits, not entirely unsuccessfully) when he described Microsoft’s initiative to create a more transparent and open corporation image. As Fred now understood for himself, it was naive of him to expect a humanistic approach from MS.

President Waggener Edstrom Frank Shaw wrote a post in a corporate blog, where he spoke from his point of view, from the point of view of a PR specialist. He drew up a detailed plan for the preparation and conduct of a “splendid” interview and expressed the opinion that it is quite logical that in this process both parties should work equally hard, because the result is important for everyone. If everything is done correctly, he writes, then both the journalist and the hero of the interview receive from him exactly what they wanted.

Wired editor in chief Chris Anderson (Chris Anderson), in turn, expressed his opinion on the topic in his own blog Long Tail . He realizes that in Microsoft, as in other large companies, they are striving to gradually get away from the old closed system of interaction with society (or, at least, significantly dilute it). And their efforts in this field are difficult to overestimate: the corporation now employs more than 3,500 bloggers who make its activities open as never before. However, in a transitional period such phenomena as excesses or, on the contrary, relapses of the outgoing habitual closed behavior are inevitable. Vogelstine encountered this. However, as Anderson admits, almost everything in the Fred dossier was pure truth, and it makes no sense to be offended by it.

And conclusions about the existence and the very possibility of complete transparency, which is now talked about a lot, not only in the US, but also in our vast expanses, everyone still has to do by himself. In any case, this story once again showed that the world is not becoming easier, and you should not be too surprised.