I suppose so, and there are examples of massive fallout from the public finding out about internal decisions; Elop's Nokia memo springs to mind. Is it as simple

I suppose so, and there are examples of massive fallout from the public finding out about internal decisions; Elop's Nokia memo springs to mind. Is it as simple as transparency to your friends, opacity elsewhere though? My first thought is that some of those situations reflect genuinely bad business decisions, and maybe it's better to take the public hit immediately rather than struggle on in secret doing something whose dumbness is only visible to people outside your reality distortion field. The other thing is, how do you distinguish between people who are with you and not? As the article noted, once you tell employees the information often ends up outside the company anyway. And not all employees are necessarily with you - they might agree with the broad mission of your company but disagree with how you're executing it, like the Nokia Plan B thing (although that turned out to be a hoax). Should you try to exclude people like that? I should clarify that I'm not sure if Apple's secretiveness is a "great business decision", merely that it seems to work for them in terms of marketing. Would a company like Apple work better or worse if they operated more in the open? Unfortunately, there's only one Apple so it's hard to know. That Semler article was interesting. Have you read Maverick? Would you recommend it?