Ed Batista has a post about Maj. Gen. Jeff Hammon’s response to an article by Lt. Col. Paul Yingling titled A failure in generalship in the Armed Forces Journal. The article was called “blistering critique of the Army brass,” by Greg Jaffe of the Wall Street Journal.

On June 25, The New Yorker published a story titled The General’s Report by Seymour Hersh. The story details what happened to Army Major General Antonio M. Taguba, who lead the army investigation into Abu Ghraib. (via tompeters.com)

These articles are examples of how not to deal with critical information. Leaders must embrace both positive and negative information. There is always a short term cost of negative information, but reducing transparency within the organization to minimize the impact of negative information is WRONG. The reduction of organizational transparency will carry a larger cost over the long term, than that of the negative information. Reduced Transparency results in less trust, increased transactional and operational costs.