[Editor's Note: This the final post in a three-part series about how corporate transparency can reshape business. Part one details the value of transparency as an investment, and part two explores why your CSR report isn't enough.]

The last two articles have covered the importance of transparency, and how it involves developing knowledge, honing communication, and identifying why you are opening up, for whom, about what, and through which mediums.

All of that is well and good and necessary in the fishbowl that is the modern marketplace. These actions should help companies improve or protect their brand reputation and build equity with customers, particularly in the event of a mishap. At the same time, there are unintended consequences of transparency that companies should recognize.

First of all, with information comes expectations, and you can not reverse transparency any more than you can reverse a child riding a bike for the first time -- it is a skill that needs to be cultivated and nurtured, not put back in the garage.

Secondly, your external requests for transparency are perfectly inelastic. Once you share one ingredient or aspect of your business, there will always be customers who want you to share even more.

Thirdly, transparency about your actions is a de facto acknowledgment of accountability for your actions. But this does not equal accountability to all of your stakeholders. These concepts of accountability are very different, and can lead to dramatically different results for your company. This article focuses on the hazards of misinterpreting the skill of transparency with the notion that you need to be accountable to everyone.

In the United States and much of the world, "accountability to shareholders" has been both an internal rallying cry and an excuse, akin to "my brother made me do it," that has allowed companies to justify almost anything they want within legal reason, including least-cost but potentially disreputable suppliers, and delaying the abolition of certain substances of concern because the capital required would simply be "too costly."

Moreover, this accountability was narrowed even further in the 1990's, when employee stock options came into favor. Over 20 percent of U.S. corporate employees (non-governmental) are now shareholders of the companies they work for (National Center for Employee Ownership, 2009), compared to about 13 percent in the U.K.

This helps to explain the American obsession with quarterly analyst calls, and the inability to look beyond the next three months, which appears more prevalent in the U.S. than across the pond. In my last seven years of consulting, I have seen at least two U.S. companies install a live electronic feed of their share price onto a flat-screen in their entrance lobbies, and I have seen a CEO get up and leave a long-term strategy meeting, without a hint of irony, to check the movement of the company's share price over the preceding 15 minutes.