I wish I’d asked more explicitly to previous employers: What regulations do we reinterpret because they’re horrible written and everyone ignores them? What parts of our business do we sugarcoat to customers? To investors? I wish the answer to these questions was “we follow all regulations exactly, and give customers and investors the most accurate possible picture of our business,” and I would love to try to run my own business that way (especially the part about giving customers very honest answers), but this hasn’t empirically been the case anywhere I’ve worked.
Put another way: most people are meta-honest, even though they’ve never heard of the term. But they’ll never tell you in which situations they think lying is OK unless you ask. You should ask.
I wish I’d asked more explicitly to previous employers: What regulations do we reinterpret because they’re horrible written and everyone ignores them? What parts of our business do we sugarcoat to customers? To investors? I wish the answer to these questions was “we follow all regulations exactly, and give customers and investors the most accurate possible picture of our business,” and I would love to try to run my own business that way (especially the part about giving customers very honest answers), but this hasn’t empirically been the case anywhere I’ve worked.
Put another way: most people are meta-honest, even though they’ve never heard of the term. But they’ll never tell you in which situations they think lying is OK unless you ask. You should ask.