Bad news is good news to an executive. Good news is no news. No news is bad news.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

You know what? Bad news is good news. We all want our lives and our business and profession to be full of positive stuff and to be nice and enjoyable, but to get there we must treat bad news as good news.

You could say that bad news is good news, good news is no news, and no news is bad news. What this means is that when you allow bad news to come up in the organization, bad news to be brought to the leadership of a company. Then you can take action and fix the problems immediately. That’s how they’d become good news.

Then when you get good news I said that it’s no news, because company should be producing a good results all the time, so good news is not a surprise and therefore good news is no news.

Finally, no news is really bad news because if you don’t hear about the operations, about the problems, about to what’s happening in the company, if you have bad reporting, poor communication, if people are afraid of telling you the real state of affairs. If they’re more concerned about their own career and how they look like than telling you the truth, then your business is in serious trouble.

That’s why bad news is good news and that’s how we must manage our organizations. We must encourage people to bring up the bad news and speak about it and then we’ll resolve it. Of course you’re going to go too far and you can have too much of bad news. So you have to manage it a little bit. But it’s very important that an organization feels that they can always come to you with their bad news. Then you can take an action and you fix it, and that’s good news.