Executive smarts should be made public

by Thornton May

April 9, 2001 —

We, as a society, and you, as a part of the senior management team, need to do some hard thinking about the fundamentals of information management.
Specifically, we need to figure out what corporate information should be public and what should be private.

The Dutch are way ahead of us. In the 17th century, unshaded windows entered the behavioral mainstream in the Netherlands. The back of the house, the zone of privacy, was separated from the front of the house -- perhaps the first data firewall. The Dutch, ever focused on mercantile success, used the front of the house to entertain clients. The windows at the front of the house were always open. The Dutch have a word describing this balance of public and private parts of the home -- gezelligheid. Executives need to develop a feel for informational gezelligheid.

One area where more privacy would be a great thing would be in media coverage of how executives live their private lives -- how they spend time with their families, where they shop, where they play and where they worship. One of the Fourth Estate's finest moments was its sensitivity toward Franklin Roosevelt's polio while he was president.

One area where less privacy would be good is the full and timely disclosure of senior management's mental capacity and knowledge base. What the top brass knows and doesn't know should be public knowledge. In the future, knowledge auditors will test not only for fraud but also for issue ignorance. If a management team is unaware or unconnected to the best thinking on an issue, you as an investor, customer or employee have cause for concern. Today, the inner workings of key corporate minds are considered off-limits and private. This has to change.

Is it outside the bounds of believability to assume that investors, customers and constituents might, in a knowledge-base economy, actually want to know what executives know about key issues? Senior management has a fiduciary responsibility. Does it not also have a "cerebral" responsibility to know the right stuff?

On the not-so-distant, technology-intensive horizon, our litigation-obsessed and responsibility/accountability-sensitized society will be populated with "value heroes" (executives who know how to create value with IT investments) and "value villains" (executives who don't). Villains will be sent to "value prisons," or re-education centers for the digitally challenged, for rehabilitation.

Knowledge doesn't depend so much on the where (such as the university attended) or the what (courses taken), as on the when and the whom. We've found that some of the most profound and high-value insights emerge from conversations with smart people in shared spaces. One test of senior executives might be an analysis of whom they hang out with.

Many executives haven't been involved in high-learning shared spaces for a long time. If regulators such as the Securities and Exchange Commission start requiring disclosures of what executives know about specific topics, where they learned it and from whom, you can expect several important changes, including the following:

In the executive education industry, you'll see an increase in metrics of how executives use the information imparted to create value and more specifics regarding what's being taught and who's teaching it.
You'll see a much more public ranking of gurus and teachers, those who own the issues of the day.
You'll see a much more public linking of which corporations use which gurus.
You'll see a much more public sharing of which executives are being exposed to which awareness-expanding programs.

Knowledge, what specific executives know, is going to be front and center on the radar screen. And don't be surprised to see ratings for external consultants and educators, and grades for senior executives.

Computerworld