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in the conversation, and when you get more people in the conversation, to state the obvious, you get idea rich. By that, I mean many more ideas get surfaced, discussed, pulled apart, and improved. Instead of everyone shutting down, everyone opens up and learns. Any organization—or unit or team—that brings more people and their minds into the conversation has an immediate advantage.

    Second , candor generates speed. When ideas are in everyone’s face, they can be debated rapidly, expanded and enhanced, and acted upon. That approach—surface, debate, improve, decide—isn’t just an advantage, it’s a necessity in a global marketplace. You can be sure that any upstart five-person enterprise down the street or in Shanghai or in Bangalore can move faster than you to begin with. Candor is one way to keep up.

    Third , candor cuts costs—lots—although you’ll never be able to put a precise number on it. Just think of how it eliminates meaningless meetings and b.s. reports that confirm what everyone already knows. Think of how candor replaces fancy PowerPoint slides and mind-numbing presentations and boring off-site conclaves with real conversations, whether they’re about company strategy, a new product introduction, or someone’s performance.

    Put all of its benefits and efficiencies together and you realize you just can’t afford not to have candor. *
     
    SO WHY NOT?
     
    Given the advantages of candor, you have to wonder, why don’t we have more of it?
    Well, the problem starts young.
    The facts are, we are socialized from childhood to soften bad news or to make nice about awkward subjects. That is true in every culture and in every country and in every social class. It doesn’t make any difference if you are in Iceland or Portugal, you don’t insult your mother’s cooking or call your best friend fat or tell an elderly aunt that you hated her wedding gift. You just don’t.
    What happened at a suburban cocktail party we attended recently is classic. Over white wine and sushi rolls, one woman standing in a cluster of five others started lamenting the horrible stress being endured by the local elementary school’s music teacher. Other guests chimed in, all agreeing that fourth-graders were enough to send you to the insane asylum. Fortunately, just before the music teacher was canonized, another guest entered the conversation, saying, “Are you guys crazy? That teacher gets fifteen weeks off a year!” She pointed to the doctor standing in the circle, who had been nodding away in agreement. “Robert,” she said, “you make life-and-death decisions every day. Surely you don’t buy this sad story, do you?”
    Talk about killing polite chitchat. The new guest sent everyone scattering, mostly toward the bar.
    Candor just unnerves people. *
    That was a lighthearted example, of course, but when you try to understand candor, you are really trying to understand human nature. For hundreds of years, psychologists and social scientists have studied why people don’t say what they mean, and philosophers have been reflecting on the same subject for literally thousands of years.
    A good friend of mine, Nancy Bauer, is a professor of philosophy at Tufts University. When I ask her about candor, she tells me that most philosophers have come to the same conclusions on this topic as most of us laypeople do with age and experience. Eventually, you come to realize that people don’t speak their minds because it’s simply easier not to. When you tell it like it is, you can so easily create a mess—anger, pain, confusion, sadness, resentment. To make matters worse, you then feel compelled to clean up that mess, which can be awful and awkward and time-consuming. So you justify your lack of candor on the grounds that it prevents sadness or pain in another person, that not saying anything or telling a little white lie is the kind, decent thing to do. But in fact, Nancy says, classic philosophers like Immanuel Kant give