Today Fortune Magazine highlighted Smart Trust  in Why Trust Matters so Much In Business.  Smart Trust was #7 on Wall Street Journal’s bestseller list and is rapidly spreading through North America’s best led organizations.   Creating cultures of high trust is a growing 2012  focus of progressive companies recovering from the recent downturn.

If you missed last weeks telecast on Smart Trust or if you want to share it with colleagues or friends (please do) it is available now at SmartTrustBook.com.  Thanks for all the tremendous feedback and positive reactions as evidenced by the continued strong sales of Smart Trust!  

Please help us spread the word:  Go to the help us spread the word tab on SmartTrustBook.com to access numerous free resources, a picture of the book, excerpts  and other digital files you can use to blog, tweet or write newsletters including Smart Trust.  Become an advocate of Smart Trust by forwarding links to friends, colleagues, and other stakeholders.  Together we can start the ripple effect of a global renaissance of trust

Thanks for being an ambassador of Smart Trust

They also announced today their prestigious 2012 Thought Leaders in Trustworthy Business Behavior list that Stephen M. R. Covey and I are honored to be included on for the second year in a row.

Smart Trust teaches how to trust in a low trust world by mastering a skill we call Smart Trust that help you navigate risks and maximize possibilities.

Thanks to all our customers for advocating trust and propelling Smart Trust to bestseller status.  More importantly thank you for leading out and demonstrating that Smart Trust is a better way to live and to lead.

Forbes’ Dan Schwabel interviewed Stephen M. R. Covey about Smart Trust: Creating Prosperity, Energy and Joy in a Low Trust World in an article he called How to Build a Company People Trust.

Stephen told Dan in part:

“At its core, building trust comes down to your credibility and your behavior. In the book, we identified 5 Smart Trust “actions” that were common to high trust leaders and organizations. For example, the 5th action of Smart Trust is to “lead out in extending trust to others,” highlighting the reality that one of the best ways to create trust is simply to give trust. This is because of the reciprocity of trust—when we give it, people return it; when we withhold it, they withhold it.

Yes, a few may attempt to abuse it: but we shouldn’t allow the few that we can’t trust to define for us the many that we can. Instead, focus on building a high trust culture around the many that will help us weed out the few. And it’s the leader’s job to go first in extending trust. That’s what leaders do. The first job of any leader is to inspire trust; the second job is to extend trust. Leaders need to be smart about it, of course, because there is risk in trusting. But there is also risk in not trusting—in fact, not trusting is often the greater risk. Smart Trust helps us find the sweet spot and develop the judgment of how to wisely extend trust in a low-trust world.”

Join Stephen and me for our first live telecast on our new book Smart Trust: Creating Prosperity, Energy and Joy in a Low Trust World  this Thursday January 12th.  We will candidly share and discuss with you a one hour overview of the book.  Go to SmartTrustBook.com to register.  Join us whether  you have had the time to read or even buy the book yet.  We trust you will do both.

Finally we are on the verge of publishing our new book Smart Trust: Creating Prosperity, Energy and Joy in a low Trust World,  after several years of extensive research, interviews, collabortion and study.  Smart Trust  highlights enlightening principles and anecdotes of people and organizations that are not only achieving unprecendented prosperity from high-trust relationships and cultures but–even more inspiring–also attaining elevated levels of energy and joy. 

The sustainable success these leaders and enterprises are exhibiting is paradoxically being produced in what has proved to be the lowest trust economic climate in years, if not decades.  Smart Trust shows what they are doing and the 5 actions they are commonly taking to prosper, against all odds, in the same economic circumstances causing so many others to fail.

Smart Trust has met the strict scrutiny of business  leaders around the globe and is validated by research from multiple sources that confirms that high-trust organizations outperform low-trust organizations by nearly 3 times.

Find out why trusted people are more likely to get hired or promoted,  make more money,  get the best projects and the bigger budgets, and are typically last to be laid off.  It is our hope and intent that reading Smart Trust will increase your probability of not just thriving, but prospering in this increasingly unpredictable economic marketplace.

Stephen M R Covey and I do intend to make this year our best year yet as far as our mission to shift global governance  on teams in organizations and hopefully even countries to one of high trust.  We were committed and optimistic when we chose the sub tittle to our first book The Speed of Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everything.  We actually approached that sub title a little sheepishly at the time.  We felt in 2006 that perhaps it was a little too bold.  Now in hindsight after selling over 1 million copies of The Speed of Trust  and spending the last 2 years researching and writing our new book Smart Trust: Creating Prosperity, Energy and Joy in a Low Trust World, that feel if anything we understated the significance of trust.  This year we intend to boldly emphasize the over arching influence that trust has on all aspects of our lives and leadership.  We strongly suggest that high trust is the key to transforming toxic relationships,  toxic teams,  toxic organizations and even toxic countries into extraordinary growth engines that will drive our ailing economy to new heights.

We have discovered and documented in Smart Trust compelling examples and evidence that certain “outliers” of success are producing extraordinary results in the same circumstances causing others to fail. We are thrilled that Smart Trust will be in stores in 10 short days and provide a platform for this important dialogue to make 2012 our best year yet.

Rarely does a leadership book garner as much credibility as does Touch Points by Campbell’s trusted Chief Executive Doug Conant and respected intenational leadership authority Mette Norgaard.  It is a perfect blend of Mette’s hard won and informed perspective consulting leaders of many of the World’s top organizations and Doug’s real time and full time leadership of fortune 500 organizations including as the current CEO of Campbells. Norgaard has consulted such well known organizations as Microsoft, Proctor & Gamble, and Finnish Broadcasting and Conant led giant Nabisco prior to taking the helm at Cambells several years ago.

As you know Stephen M R Covey and I read a lot of books.  I have been averaging one per week this year.  That said this is a clear stand out informed by two insiders that really know leadership.  Stephen M R Covey said this remarkable book will forever change the way we view leadership.  I could not agree more.  The practical reality of leading by moment to moment Touchpoints makes so much sense and is so internally validating to real world leaders and practitioners it is hard to imagine it has not been written about before.  Finally a guidebook that actually guides you on how to lead effectively now. Not now. Right now.  I strongly recommend you read it right now. You can get it at Amazon. Enjoy!

Following one of his presentations, a man approached Stephen backstage with a question that was obviously troubling him deeply. “Are you really serious about this?”, he asked incredulously. “Are there really people out there who operate with the kind of trust you’ve described?” This man lived and worked in a country where there was ripe corruption, characterized my massive distrust. He was clearly feeling deeply torn. He sincerely wanted to believe what we’d said, but was finding it almost impossible in the context of his environment.

In many variations, this question has been posed to us repeatedly by people around the world–in organizations, businesses, schools and government. In this era of profound distrust, are there really those who succeed and experience the benefits of trust in their personal and professional lives? If so, who are they? What are they doing? And how?

This new book is written in response to these questions. The short answer is, “Yes—absolutely!” There are hundreds of examples of people, companies and countries—individuals, teams, organizations, markets and industries—that have created cultures and relationships of high trust and are enjoying the wonderful benefits demonstrated in this forthcoming book—prosperity, energy and joy. In fact, one of the most exciting dimensions of our work over the past seven years, even predating The Speed of Trust book, has been to both sense and see first-hand the groundswell renaissance of trust that is gaining momentum and transforming lives and leadership around the globe—even in the midst of the “crisis of trust” that fills today’s headlines.