Why do organizations with talented people, capable leadership, and adequate resources make the same catastrophic decisions repeatedly? The conventional answer, drawn from the rational-actor model that still dominates management theory, is that they lack the right information. The Honest Organization argues that they do not lack information. They lack the structural capacity to act on what they already know.
Drawing on the behavioral economics of self-concept maintenance, prospect theory, motivated reasoning, and escalation of commitment, Sharam Kohan demonstrates how organizations systematically misprocess the diagnostic signals generated by their own members. Promotion decisions entrench incompetence. Grievance processes silence the voices most worth hearing. Culture change initiatives reinforce the dysfunction they are designed to correct. Legal exposure accumulates not from ignorance of the law, but from the organizational mechanisms that prevent decision-makers from seeing what they have created.
Grounded in twenty-five years of practice across industries and in the empirical literature of behavioral economics, The Honest Organization delivers both a theoretical framework and a structural design blueprint: specific, implementable interventions for hiring, promotion, employee relations, compliance, and governance that constrain self-defeating organizational behavior without requiring the people inside the organization to become different people.
This is a book for practitioners who have watched organizations destroy the solutions to their own problems, and who want to understand, at last, precisely why that happens.
