From Why do outrage management when you can coerce or deceive people instead?
Although I can’t know for sure, I suspect my clients have also typically overestimated their ability to deceive their stakeholders. For decades I have routinely advised clients that they would be wise to reveal their own guilty (or merely embarrassing) secrets, on the grounds that bad news does roughly twenty times as much reputational damage when it’s revealed by opponents or whistleblowers as when it’s acknowledged proactively by the organization itself. This advice seldom made much headway. I don’t think my clients doubted the 20x factor. I think they imagined they had better than a 19-in-20 shot at keeping their secrets secret.
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