Sunlight is the best disinfectant

Why transparency is always preferable to obfuscation but that doesn’t mean you should share everything without consideration

🎄 Welcome to IMTW issue № 42. I hope you’re having a great weekend. By the time you read this, I’ll be queuing up for my Christmas tree. I left it too late last year and ended up with a let down. Not this time. Not. This. Time. I digress…here is the week’s news likely to impact you.

📸 But first, flashback to last week when Atom became the largest company in Britain to introduce a four-day working week. This week, it seems the move is already paying off with 90% of staff switching to the new working model and a spike in job applications.

👉🏻 Now, read on to learn why:

① Running one public company is tough; running two is…err…problematic.

② Transparency builds trust so is preferable to the alternative.

③ Internal comms need to consider an external audience.

④ Blockchain interoperability is key to any digital currency.

⑤ Joining the technology arms race is essential but costly.

⑥ CMOs need discretion, support and oversight to succeed.

⑦ You need to move at your customer’s pace, not your own.

What's new?

Whether he was pushed, jumped, or just fell off while distracted by a shiny new coin, we don’t know. But we do know that Jack Dorsey left the helm at Twitter this week. TechCrunch has the story.

Jack Dorsey, ex-CEO of Twitter. Source: TechCrunch, 29 November 2021

① In short:

“CNBC reported [early on 29 November] that Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey [was] expected to step down from his role at the social media company. Shortly after, Dorsey himself confirmed the rumours and Twitter issued a press release with more details.
"Parag Agrawal, who joined Twitter as an engineer in 2011 and has served as CTO since 2017, will take over as Dorsey’s successor.”
“Dorsey is the CEO of both Twitter and Square, a financial company that serves both consumer and corporate customers with payment, cash management and transference services. Square confirmed there are no changes to Dorsey’s role there, nor anything else related to leadership, strategy, or financial outlook.”

Why does it matter?

There is so much to ‘unpack’ here - not least what this means for Twitter and Square (for what it’s worth, I’m with Scott Galloway: I think Twitter doesn’t make it to the end of 2022 without being acquired - hopefully by a fintech, possibly by Salesforce, improbably but not impossibly by Square itself to make a super app - and in any event Dorsey takes Square - now Block - deep into decentralised fintech, with a focus on payments with digital currencies) but also whether we’re seeing Big Tech’s ‘founder CEO’ cult petering out. That’s for another newsletter though, written by another author.

Our focus here is on marketing and communications. And I want to draw your attention to the manner in which this was communicated and some of the language used. Shall we, as they like to say in Silicon Valley, double-click on it?

Dorsey announced his departure to the outside world by tweeting a copy of his internal ‘all staff’ email. It’s his post scriptum that got me thinking:

“I’m tweeting this email. My one wish is for Twitter Inc to be the most transparent company in the world. Hi mom!”

This ode to transparency led Agrawal, in turn, to tweet a copy of his internal ‘reply all’ email.

Disregarding the ‘tech bro’ language that makes anyone not steeped in Bay Area culture a little uneasy, we still need to ask ourselves whether all this transparency is real or desirable.

It’s obvious that this is absolutely not radical transparency. It may purport to be but there is still - for very good reasons - plenty these communications don’t tell us. We’re spared the real circumstances, reasons and machinations behind Dorsey’s departure and Agrawal was doubtless given preview of the message and time for his Comms person to advise him on this response.

② Broadly speaking though, I think financial comms people could learn from this approach. Better to err on the side of sharing freely - or at least assuming your internal comms will eventually make their way into the world. As The Silver Fox of Financial PR Andrew Marshall wrote this week:

“Searching ‘an internal memo seen by’ produced 42 results in New York Times over the last year, and 87 results in the FT over the last 6 months. These stories and their equivalents elsewhere cover a spectrum – from extremely sensitive and embarrassing news for an organisation, through to information that is widely known in business circles and not of any real reputational consequence. ”

In other words, transparency builds trust and is thus almost always preferable to the alternative - particularly because most information gets out eventually.

What's next?

Take action

In the age of smartphones and social media - just as there’s no such things as ‘off the record’ when talking to journalists - there is no such thing as ‘confidential or internal only’ when communicating with your team. Indeed, as a Compliance colleague once said to me, “never write anything down that you wouldn’t feel comfortable reading out in open court.” That helps sharpen your focus.

The threat of leaks or legal actions notwithstanding, broadly speaking, I always favour transparency over obfuscation. It’s just good business. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t some guidelines.

③ For example:

Consider whether an internal announcement even has an external audience: Is there a genuine interest from your customers or stakeholders? If not, don’t proactively share it - you’ll just look somewhat narcissistic.
Write for everyone: If you are going to share your internal comms externally, they should be written with both audiences in minds. That means avoiding lingo or acronyms that would alienate someone who doesn’t walk your hallowed halls.
Assume other internal communications might leak: If you run a good business and preside over a good culture, there shouldn’t be anything too damning. So be sanguine about it. Make sure your comms people are proactively articulating your message so you’re comfortable the record is straight.
Keep one-to-one communications private: not because they’re sensitive necessarily but because sharing them is deeply disrespectful to your correspondent (a lesson Boris Johnson recently learnt the hard way).

Get help

Visit InMarketing, my resource library for leaders in finance or technology who want to innovate, interact and influence.

If you have a question, just hit ‘reply’ or send me a tweet. I always do my best to answer helpfully.

Can I ask you a favour? If you found this useful or know someone who would, please share it. It really helps me to grow the community of regular IMTW readers.

What else?

Three other articles that are worthy of your time.

FINANCE

What does interoperability mean for CBDCs?

④ Blockchain interoperability is the elusive key to making any digital currency viable.

“Central bankers and senior executives at commercial banks cite the need for interoperability when they discuss digital sovereign currencies and stablecoins. It’s a key factor in making central-bank digital currencies (CBDCs) relevant and useful in blockchain-based finance.”
“Whether a CBDC is designed to be retail or wholesale, the bigger question is how it interacts with the rest of the world.”
“Citi is advocating for the idea of a ‘regulated liability network’ – a single distributed ledger in which central banks, commercial banks, and other authorised entities can manage tokens that represent central bank liabilities. But it seems unlikely that the world’s governments will come together to form such a platform.”

TECHNOLOGY

AJ Bell shares tumble with big tech spend

⑤ Joining the technology arms race, while essential, is costly.

Source: New Model Adviser, 2 December 2021

“AJ Bell upped its tech budget by almost a third in the 12 months to the end of September as it sank cash into expanding and updating its systems and ensuring it is proofed against any repeat of last year’s embarrassing platform outage.”
“Technology costs rose from £20m to just below £26m following the acquisition in March of mobile platform Adalpha. And this week it announced the launch of a new consumer investment app, Dodl.”
“There is increasing demand for simplified, app-based investment propositions in both the D2C and advised markets, so we are investing in two, which we will soon bring to market. We expect both to launch during 2022 and we will be investing further in our brand and marketing activities to support their initial phase of growth.” - Andy Bell, AJ Bell founder and chief executive

MEDIA & MARKETING

How to help your CMO boost global growth

⑥ CMOs need discretion, support and oversight to succeed.

Source: Harvard Business Review, December 2021

Three characteristics unite successful CMOs. They have:

Strategic discretion (measured by comparing the CMOs’ tenure at their firms with that of the other top managers): “They had the power to develop global customer and supplier relationships and set go-to-market strategies.”
Operational discretion (measured by the number of business segments they were involved in): “They could decide - for example - how the firm would communicate with customers (whether through digital or traditional channels, in personalized or mass messages, and so on.)”
Financial discretion (measured by dividing a given period’s marketing budget by the previous period’s sales): “They could decide how much to invest in various activities and what budgetary trade-offs to make—for example, how to allocate funds between traditional and digital marketing.”

Well said

⑦ Leda Glyptis, Chief Client Officer at 10x Banking, on those long-serving big bank types who do things in their own time:

“If you think you can dictate timings for the business you are in, irrespective of client needs, market movements and day-to-day operational realities, you are either irrelevant to your business… Or a hindrance.”