WikiLeaks and your bottom line
At first glance, there is little to connect a group of ‘hactivists’ publishing diplomatic and military secrets through a nuclear bunker in Stockholm to the amount of spare cash lying around your professional services firm (PSF).
But the more you look at the activities of WikiLeaks and its mission to expose the inner workings of governments and the business challenges facing many services firms, the more the two phenomena seem intertwined.
Grant Butler, Managing Director, Editor Group
The common thread is transparency. From WikiLeaks to Google Maps, LinkedIn dossiers and the ability to see a person’s phone number before you answer the call, we’re getting used to having a lot of information about the world around us and the people we’re dealing with. In turn, PSF clients are demanding more insights into how their work is done and charged for, which is making it much harder to generate super profits behind a wall of smoke and mirrors.
Indeed, it is getting spectacularly hard to hide anything and, as diplomats worldwide discovered last December, becoming harder to say or do one thing internally and another externally.
The question for firms is how to respond? In broad terms, there are two ways to go.
The first is to try to keep the same business model and clamp down on information. Think Hillary Clinton and consider things like vetting staff members’ LinkedIn profiles and social networking, for instance.
The second is to accept that even if they put WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in Guantanamo Bay, transparency is the new reality and that there may be competitive advantage to be gained from greater openness.
