In the foreword of his game changing new book for education,  The Leader In Me my good friend Dr. Stephen R. Covey misspoke.  Rare for him.  With this the 20th anniversary year of his landmark book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People it’s about time I tell one on him.  My dear Dr. C, the comment in the foreword that I take such exception to is your reference to the 7 Habits that “the book caught a wave that even I had no way of anticipating”.  Not only did you anticipate it, you willed it into being.  You epitomize Jim Collins level 5 leader that he refers to in Good to Great as having a perfect blend of deep personal humility and intense professional will.

 I remember it clearly, I had only worked with Dr. Covey for a couple of years and we were having a meeting with our publisher Simon & Schuster in thier headquarters in Rockafeller Center in New York City.  Their entire team met with us around the big round marble table on the executive floor.   I considered myself an optimist even then but Dr. C exceeded my expectations.  This was 1989 and we were trying to convince the S&S brain-trust that they should do a first print run of 100,000 copies for The 7 Habits, which for a first time business author was unheard of.  I can still see the S&S executives rolling their eyes as we suggested such an absurd proposal. (You S&S folks know who you are).  It gets better.  As support for his request Dr. C proceeded to inform them that he predicted that 7 Habits would sell 10 million copies by the end of it’s first decade. You could have heard a pin drop as the S&S executives looked at each other like whose gonna be the one that tells this guy he is out of his ever loving mind and is as naive as a country bumpkin (from Utah no less).  Well, you know the rest of the story, 7 Habits did sell over 10 million copies the first decade and darn near an additional 10 million in the second decade and is still a top 100 book of all books on Amazon as we speak.

Arnold Palmer was asked:  How do you get over being intimidated by somebody?  Answer:  Beat them at golf. 

Al Ries and his daughter Laura’s new book War in the Boardroom: Why Left-Brain Management and Right-Brain Marketing Don’t See Eye-to-Eye–and What to Do About It is dead on insightful.  Of course I am biased, I’m a serial marketeer.  We built this city (read business) on rock n’ roll (read marketing). As Al and Laura point out “Perception always trumps reality.”  I could not agree more.  The first chapter is worth the price of the book.  Al has been behind the scenes advising executives for years and supports his conclusions with plentiful evidence. This example is priceless.  “We can visualize what happened in the boardroom.  Grown men, with decades of experience in the automobile field, sat around a conference table and decided to launch a Volkswagen vehicle with a price tag reaching 6 digits. (we don’t know any right brain marketer who would have thought that was a good idea.)”   As the adage goes visionary entrepreneurs can not manage scale but with out their vision there will be no scale to manage.

Our friend Matt Hutcheson, a global authority on 401k regulation who regularly testifies for congress, sent us this link today to a blog entry on Brightscope showing trust in organizations is only 12% as of December 2008.  They call 2009 the year of Transparency in an articulate call for more light in financial regulation.

” . . . something important was destroyed in the last few months. It is an asset crucial to production, even if it is not made of bricks and mortar. This asset is TRUST. While trust is fundamental to all trade and investment, it is particularly important in financial markets, where people depart with their money in exchange for promises. To study how recent events have undermined Americans’ trust in the stock markets and institutions in general, we have launched the Chicago Booth/Kellogg School Financial Trust Index.”

The Kellogg Financial Trust Index called trust:

The Missing Link 

“Something important was destroyed in the last few months. It is an asset crucial to production, even if it is not made of bricks and mortar. While this asset does not enter standard national account statistics or standard economic models, it is so crucial to development that its absence — according to Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow — is the cause of much of the economic backwardness in the world. This asset is TRUST. As stressed by Arrow: “Virtually every commercial transaction has within itself an element of trust, certainly any transaction conducted over a period of time.” Without trust, cooperation breaks down, financing breaks down and investment stops. One can bomb a country back to the Stone Age, destroy much of its human capital, and eliminate its political institution. But, if trust persists, the country may be able to right itself in just a few years, as in Germany and Japan after World War II. Conversely, you can endow a country with all the greatest natural resources but, if there is no trust, there is no progress.”

We could not agree more.  We must all step up and behave in ways that inspire trust if we are to hope to turn the tide any time soon.  The tide will turn and this dramatic correction will shock us into taking trust more seriously much like 9/11 sparked a national sense of patriotism.  Let’s hope our paradigm shift of awareness sparks a behavior shift that is sustainable.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said Sunday in a rare television interview that fear is one of the biggest challenges remaining to restart the US. Economy.  Duh!  This interview is a conscious effort on the part of the US Fed to become more transparent and restore trust.  Restoring trust again is seen as the recipe to hope.  Restoring trust on the corporate or individual level requires the same deliberate effort.  The good news is confidence is building and will continue to grow slowly as leaders continue to behave in ways to restore trust as Bernanke did by just taking this interview.

What equivalent gesture might you make to restore trust in your team, organization or relationship?

Emile Durkheim once said, “when mores are sufficient laws are unnecessary,  when mores are insufficient laws are unenforceable.”    Our financial regulators could learn from this premise. The transparency of the web creates the possibility of self regulation Durkheim envisioned.  Ebay pioneered this self regualation that enabled as, founder Peter Omidyar said “that the miracle of Ebay was that 135 million strangers could trust each other”. A brilliant article in Wired Magazine Road Map for Financial Recovery: Radical Transparency Now! By Daniel Roth  02.23.09 lays out a very doable solution for our financial train wreck: 

 ”That’s why it’s not enough to simply give the SEC—or any of its sister regulators—more authority; we need to rethink our entire philosophy of regulation. Instead of assigning oversight responsibility to a finite group of bureaucrats, we should enable every investor to act as a citizen-regulator. We should tap into the massive parallel processing power of people around the world by giving everyone the tools to track, analyze, and publicize financial machinations. The result would be a wave of decentralized innovation that can keep pace with Wall Street and allow the market to regulate itself—naturally punishing companies and investments that don’t measure up—more efficiently than the regulators ever could.

The revolution will be powered by data, which should be unshackled from the pages of regulatory filings and made more flexible and useful. We must require public companies and all financial firms to report more granular data online—and in real time, not just quarterly—uniformly tagged and exportable into any spreadsheet, database, widget, or Web page. The era of sunlight has to give way to the era of pixelization; only when we give everyone the tools to see each point of data will the picture become clear. Just as epidemiologists crunch massive data sets to predict disease outbreaks, so will investors parse the trove of publicly available financial information to foresee the next economic disasters and opportunities.”

This is an idea whose time has come.  The sunlight of transparency is the ultimate accountability.  What information in your team or organization would improve accountability?

Are you more suspicious?  Who can you count on?  

We all are sitting straight up right now and have a high level of suspicion of others especially as it comes to our money.  I was just listening to Tom Brokaw’s commencement address to Emory University from 2005.  He said this about money to these graduating seniors as they started their new life: “In this new life you will also have to think about money in a new way, life after all is not an ATM, now you have to earn the money.  Think about how you can hang on to some of it, and if you are fortunate, use the money that is beyond what you need, to save a life, to save a neighborhood, to save the world. You may be surprised to learn that it is that use of money, that is the most satisfying and gratifying.  In our family where we began with no money, we like to say that we have  discovered that God invented money so those that have it can help others.  More over while money helps, it is discounted somehow if it does not carry your full personal value and commitment.  A few years ago in a ceremony similar to this one, I declared: ‘it is easy to make a buck but it is tough to make a difference.’  A father of one of the graduates, a Wall Street success wrote to me suggesting a rewrite of that line, he said it’s tough to make a buck but if you make a lot of bucks you can make a hell of a difference. A or B because there is no wrong answer.”  Tom went on to tell this, “Class of 9/11″ as he called them (because they entered college the month of 9/11) that they had a responsibility to rise to the occasion to right the global ship of state.  

Now is the time to have a propensity to trust each other and risk again.  Now is the time to give to others and have an abundance mentality, when everything in us and around us, screams for us to have a fear based scarcity mentality.  Now is the time to use our time, not for worry, but for lifting others with our time and our treasure as history tells us we have again and again. Trust that the ripple effect of extending trust will create a tide that will raise all of us–again.  

This brings to mind a quote from George Bernard Shaw that my wife Annie and I love so much.  We first heard it from Werner Erhard in the 70’s and Annie shared it with Stephen R. Covey who quoted it in the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.  It sums up my feeling today as it has these last three decades.  We invite you to join us in sparking a global renaissance of trust.

George Bernard Shaw:

“This is the true joy in life–that being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one.  That being a force of nature, instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.  I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it what ever I can.  I want to be thoroughly used up when I die.  For the harder I work the more I live.  I rejoice in life for its own sake.  Life is no brief candle to me. It’s sort of a splendid torch which I’ve got to hold up for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.”    

May we all be a force of nature.