by Joseph Whalen

Created on: April 30, 2010

Honesty, in the private or professional world is a luxury that most people simply cannot afford.  Not all the time at least.  The idea of always employing honesty as the best policy is naïve and idealistic concept that unfortunately has no place in our flawed and imperfect world.  Although there is a distinction between lack of honesty and dishonesty, especially in the business world.

There are many things in life and in business that we simply do not need to know.  Little bits of truth that would either offer no benefit to a situation or things that could shatter our world and our self-esteem or even shake our confidence in a business partner or vendor.  When a woman asks how she looks in a new dress, is she really looking for an honest answer or is she looking for a boost to her self confidence by fishing for a compliment and some encouragement?  Does a customer really need to know that the multi-million dollar web site they contracted you to build is actually being written by a guy who may or may not have passed a correspondence course and is working out of a shady back room in India?  Of course not, as long as the product is delivered as expected.  These are examples of a lack of honesty, in which having the full truth revealed could make for a difficult situation.

There are those that will argue that a lie by omission is still a lie and therefore an example of dishonesty.  While there is merit in this concept there are those who prescribe to the philosophy that dishonesty itself has a much greater degree of deception associated with it.  Dishonesty used as a profit generator or used out of malice is vastly different than an omission.  Take the web development example above.  Had the developer taken the customers money in advance, knowing full well that they had neither the means nor the intention to deliver the product and instead absconded with the funds for sheer profit, which is a very different level of dishonesty than simply omitting information regarding the details of how a project is implemented.

Still there are others who are creative enough and crafty enough to justify almost any actions, whether it is honest or dishonest.  While there are true measurements of honesty in many cases, to large extent honesty can be subjective.  What is truthful to one person may seem deceptive to another, such as the aforementioned lie of omission example.  Then there is the woman fishing for a compliment, even though she may not feel she look attractive in the dress she asks the question anyway.  Hoping for a compliment but angry when the truth is conveyed to her.  In this case, the truth is subjective.  She may appear honestly beautiful to one observer while not so attractive to another.  The intended response from both people is the same but the truthfulness of that response is different.

Regardless of the finer points of the varying degrees of honesty and the circumstances surrounding them that we deal with on a daily basis the fact remains that there are times when honesty is needed and times when it is not needed, or needed to a lesser degree. Conversely there are also times when honesty is detrimental to a situation and the participants would do better without it. Honesty is not always the best policy, even in business.  The challenge is understanding the dynamics of a situation and determining just how much honesty a given circumstances needs.

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