IN REPLY TO THREAD: Need advice after resignation backfired at me

To me, integrity is pride of purpose in a rewarding (or even unrewarding) job. Stand firm on commitments, act in the best interests of your profession, balance the company's needs with your own, do not engage in deceptive business practices. Among other things. Be a professional, in other words.

Nowhere in the integrity handbook is "openness to a fault," to the point that it damages others' feelings or my own career prospects. Business is balancing the company's needs with your own career goals why maintaining the ethical high ground. The last "family business" I worked for was polite enough to parachute some of us out with decent severence prior to chaining up the door (Dot.com era). I expected no better, no worse, and fulfilled my end of the bargain (winding down part of the business) before I took my last check and left. I owed them nothing further and hadn't thought about it much since (year 2001).

As an example, the most "open and honest" approach is for, say, a tech major to answer fully and completely every question about flaws with their platform, underlying tech, user experience, security, and coding standards used to develop it.

Doing so would be, of-course, insane. That'd be the dumbest sales and marketing approach in the history of sales and marketing, so to speak. How about instead providing the minimum information to NOT cause churn with others...think about perception, morale, and people's feelings.

I exercise that latter approach every...single...day in my communications with my team, group, and larger organization of 1,000 or so people. I am a cog in the larger wheel, a mid-manager.

Shifting metaphors, the pinhead Wonk MIT economist splashed all over the news lately will be testifying in front of Congress shortly about his smart___ comments regarding the "stupid" American public, how "we felt we couldn't tell the truth and still sell it", and so much more related to the Affordable Care Act.

Some say he is a genius economist, and one described him as "the go-to guy to articulate complicated topics into digestible sound bytes." In the same breath, they say "...and he is at any given time maybe two seconds away from putting his foot in his mouth!" (1) . In other words, he's an Aspie's geek who needs to keep his mouth shut and let PR people do the public relations. I'm surrounded by people like that, who are brilliant but over-share all the time. I'm smart enough, or at least socially sophisticated enough, to stop talking in venues where I'm not particularly comfortable, though I'm comfortable indeed in certain subjects. The trick is knowing the difference!

(1) "Will Jonathan Gruber Topple Obamacare?" Politico online, retrieved 12/8/2014

P.S.:

Yes, then, I am qualified to lecture on the perils of excessive honesty, graduating *** laude from an Ivy League business school and a "2%er" at this particular point in my career.

Summary: ineffective leadership style. Goes to perception, and communication skills. Usually a questionable policy, when it negatively affects revenue stream of yourself or others, in the name of...?

I have a professional peer who was, and is (until he was run out), excessively honest in all his business dealings in mid-to-senior level technology firms. He was fired from one, then targeted for RIF from another, then happened yet again a third time. Ten years later, we're all pretty sure he CANNOT reconcile being right...and excessively honest...yet not being able to provide for his family. His wife is the breadwinner and they're doing OK now. The dual-nature of business tears him up inside. I'm far more pragmatic than that, in the end.

As are just about all successful American businesspeople.