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John D. Rockefeller built Standard Oil by acquiring other companies and shrouded his whole organization in secrecy. When one man resisted a deal, Rockefeller snapped at him that he had ways of making money the man knew nothing about.
There is a golden mean between telling nobody and telling everybody, and that is a company. Every great business is built around a secret that is hidden from the outside, which makes a great company a conspiracy to change the world. When you share your secret, the recipient becomes a fellow conspirator.
That is why everyone at a company should be different in the same way: a tribe of like-minded people fiercely devoted to the company mission.
How did Rockefeller keep Standard Oil secret?
Standard Oil often bought rivals through intermediaries and left their original names on the doors, so competitors and customers did not know who owned them. In 1882 Rockefeller consolidated its holdings into a trust, a structure that put dozens of companies under a handful of trustees. The Supreme Court ordered the company broken up in 1911. The ruling split it into 34 separate companies.
Why do shared secrets bond people?
Sociologist Georg Simmel wrote about this in the early 1900s in his essay on secrecy and secret societies. He argued that a secret creates a boundary between those who know and those who do not. The people on the inside share something that the outsiders lack, and it ties them together. Simmel held that the bond lasts even when the secret itself is small.
How does Coca-Cola guard its recipe?
Coca-Cola's formula has been treated as a trade secret since the 1880s. The company kept the written recipe in a bank vault in Atlanta for decades. Since 2011 the vault has been on display at the World of Coca-Cola museum in the same city. Only the formula's existence is public, and its contents are not.
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