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.

Trust Across America, the respected international think tank and research firm known for developing pragmatic criteria for identifying the most trusted organizations, today announced their 2012 list of Thought Leaders in Trustworthy Business Behaviors.  Stephen M. R. Covey and I are honored to be included for the second year in a row in this unique and prestigious company.  We join many of our  North American mentors, and peers including Barry Rellaford, one of our business partners,  Indra Nooyi, CEO of PepsiCo who wrote the foreword to our new book Smart Trust, Tony  Hsiesh, CEO of Zappos who we interviewed for our book and numerous other long time friends and colleagues.   We are humbled to be included and intend to do our part to follow the lead of Trust Across America to amplify the significance of growing high trust cultures and restoring trusted behavior as a recognized driver to restoring our global economic growth.

Renowned leadership authority Warren Bennis, also on this list, had this to say when he read our new book: “Smart Trust is without doubt one of the most powerful and seminal books of our age. It exposes and helps solve the most dangerous crisis apparent in almost all human institutions: how to trust in a low trust world.”  

We feel that Trust Across America is contributing an important platform to as Steve Jobs said: “put a dent in the universe”  as it relates to transforming our toxic economy as it relates to trust.  We applaud their efforts.

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.”

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.

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.

To Quote Steve Jobs: “When I was 17 I read a quote that went something like “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself, “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?”  Steve Jobs

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