By radical truth, I mean not filtering one’s thoughts and one’s questions, especially the critical ones. If we don’t talk openly about our issues and have paths for working through them, we won’t have partners who collectively own our outcomes.

By radical transparency, I mean giving most everyone the ability to see most everything. To give people anything less than total transparency would make them vulnerable to others’ spin and deny them the ability to figure things out for themselves. Radical transparency reduces harmful office politics and the risks of bad behavior because bad behavior is more likely to take place behind closed doors than out in the open.

Some people have called this way of operating radical straightforwardness.

I knew that if radical truth and radical transparency didn’t apply across the board, we would develop two classes of people at the company—those with power who are in the know, and those who aren’t—so I pushed them both to their limits. To me, a pervasive Idea Meritocracy = Radical Truth + Radical Transparency + Believability-Weighted Decision Making.

From a small group of people arguing informally about what’s true and what to do about it, we developed approaches, technologies, and tools over the last forty years that have taken us to a whole other level, which has been eye-opening and invaluable in ways that you can read about in the tools chapter at the end of this book. We have always been unwavering in providing this environment, and we let the people who didn’t like it self-select themselves out of the company.
