How It All Started
Ken Bogard
Once in a while, I will get asked the question “Why did you start Know Honesty?”
My quick response to that is because I’m sick of dishonesty in the workplace. That is the quick answer to it, but there is an origin story behind it and it goes like this.
Robert Frey was a professor of marketing at Grand Valley State University. When I first started taking marketing, he was the first professor that I had for that particular topic. I remember he was teaching the class on marketing. By the way, Robert Frey had all these business accolades, this big whirlpool executive, had expanded into Asia, and all this great stuff. He was about to share with the class an idea. And what he shared with the class was this, “The single biggest issue with companies is…” And I had my pen ready, and I was ready to write down what his answer was. He said, “The single biggest issue in companies is communication.”
And I thought no way. Grown human professional adults can’t communicate? How is that possible?
And the man is totally right. How naive I was. As soon as you go into the workplace you realize how terrible we treat communication.
So we are grown human adults, we can articulate better than any species on the planet, yet we don’t. We suck at communication! He was right! So, I go into the workforce not believing Robert Frey’s claim, and it’s totally true. I just learned to have a huge disdain for it, and I didn’t want to stand for that. Every career that I took and every business that I operated in, I was seeking out real communication.
And so now I’m on this relentless pursuit to get honesty in organizations and get them to be more open to their people within their organizations. So that’s how it started, and why it started.
