Walton's 10 Rules of Business Success - Rule 4 - Communicate Everything
Walton understood that there's an interesting paradox that exists in the communication aspect of business.
He listed this as the fourth of his ten rules on business success. He said: "Communicate everything you possibly can to your partners. The more they know, the more they'll understand. The more they understand, the more they'll care. Once they care, there's no stopping them. Information is power, and the gain you get from empowering your associates more than offsets the risk of informing your competitors."
Many business leaders think that the openness of information sharing in business can leave them at a competitive advantage, in reality, as Walton says, it is an empowerer that gives returns to the business through our our people far greater than any type of information that may get out to competitors.
But there's another side to this as well, when you are in constant flows of information between manager and worker, workers and workers and management and vendors etc., it gives such a competitive edge that it becomes really impossible for someone on the outside to know all that is happening within a business; there are just too many interactions to be able to measure.
