Google and Transparency

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I value transparency.

Now with the full disclosure out of the way, let me expand a bit. When a person or a business is honest with me, I love it. It hurts when they’re honest about my mistakes, but it’s just plain warm and fuzzy when they admit to their own mistakes.

Comcast (the evil empire?) sent out a letter to subscribers of cable internet a few weeks ago in my area, and the last paragraph caught my eye: a note from John Dietrich with his email address and an invitation to offer feedback! I saved the letter and this week wrote him an email with some of my ideas… and I heard back! It’s absolutely fantastic when people like John take the time to respond to messages from customers. In one of his responses he admitted that they were for the first time seriously considering just what I had suggested, a lower-cost option for service. I love that he spoke freely about this to some random guy who emailed him, it’s just awesome.

Today I watched a video that was posted on Lifehacker of Merlin Mann speaking at Google HQ about the concept of “Inbox Zero.” Inbox Zero is the idea that you have an empty inbox, when messages come in you take action on them and get them done. The whole idea is not exactly revolutionary, I remember using Yahoo Mail in the 90’s and doing this very thing, but what really stuck out to me was the questions being asked. About 10 minutes before the end of the video, some guy asked what to do when people send out group emails. His method of responding was to wait until someone else responded to it. This opened a sort of Pandora’s box where many people expressed the same thing,up to the point where most people in the room agreed to receiving over 500 emails per day! Five hundred?! Someone cutely refered to it as the “firehose of knowledge” that contains from 1%-5% actionable information! This means (for the group in that room, over 95% of their email was completely worthless.

Now, this is bad news. But that’s not the point of this post, and here’s what is: Google hosted the video. It had their copyrights all over it. The publicly traded multi-billion dollar corporation intentionally released a video which essentially told the world they have completely failed at internal communication.

You’d think I’d be wary of them now, think of them as a failure, but I don’t. Part of me feels bad for them, and another different part feels like they’re not quite the fancy place they seemed: it has made them more real and more personal, I can now relate to them in a different way than I did yesterday. This my friends is transparency. The image above is just transparent water.