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Playing our cards close to the vest has been conventional “success wisdom” for eons. Only let your people know details and facts on a “need-to-know” basis, the thinking goes, get them to do their jobs while you concentrate on the bigger picture. They can’t handle it, they don’t care about it, they don’t need the distractions. Also, we wouldn’t want company secrets slipping out, and, naturally, we can’t be sure whom we can really trust.

Then too there’s the “Bad News Might Kill Them” school of thought. If your people knew the mothership had sprung a leak, for example, or (heaven forbid) was sinking, you’re your subordinates and their coworkers would leap for the lifeboats in a heartbeat. For those who stayed on board, morale would sink too, and with it, loyalty and productivity.

But are such notions fact or myth? A new book pops the bubble for all who’ve always viewed such thinking as common sensical. This book proposes a strong case for more open approaches to in-house corporate communication, including sharing EVERYTHING, the bad and the ugly as well as the good. So claims Ram Charan, author of What the CEO Wants You to Know: How Your Company Really Works. Ram insists that sprinkling lots and lots of information around the company, about company goals, strategies and resources, is the way to go. You must totally end the age-old practice of staying tight-lipped and “careful.” If you do, you’ll more likely spur precisely the level of dedication and industry that traditional managerial ways most wish to protect and preserve.

“Big picture thinking can lead to actions that will help a company survive, even prosper, when the economy is in the doldrums,” Charan explains. Yet managers, he says, especially the highest-ups, typically foster within their organizations a “knowledge vacuum,” leaving workers perennially in the dark and preventing them from accessing information they need to improve on their own. By extension such improvement should lead to greater results on behalf of one’s employer too so that stifling this momentum often instead insures exactly the opposite of what in-the-dark techniques are intended to do. Even the best employees end up evolving protective layers of tunnel vision, reasoning, “The only thing that matters is my specific job, my division or department. To hell with the ‘big picture’ (whatever that is!) and damn the company’s concerns. I’m just going to focus on my personal turf.”

Charan adds, “I’ve advised hundreds of companies and never have I seen a situation in which the employees did not want to know more about how the company really works. They want to know. They feel it’s their company.” And because they do, he adds, they want to help.

So, if all this makes so much sense, what keeps us from leaping onto Charan’s recommendations today and putting them in action? Why does a book about communicating fully with one’s employees appear so radical?

Perhaps it’s just that we all get too easily caught up in managing-from-fear. This leads to overly protecting our turfs while hoarding what resources we’re afraid could be suddenly taken away. Companies are supposed to be collections of individuals working together for a common organizational good. But who really believes that, or operates that way? Instead we plod along as if we have everything to lose should we share our institutional knowledge.

Granted, it’s a vicious cycle. When your own boss refuses to share with you, you can’t help but think, “Hey, why should I share with anyone else, including my own staff?” It tickles down and spreads out that way.

But sometimes life takes us down a hard road where it’s time for one brave soul to stand up and break the accepted if counterproductive pattern. Might YOU be the designated courageous one today?