We often ask the question: who do you trust? to organizational leaders and workers around the globe.  In both the public and the private sectors there is now an uneasy caution about who you can trust.  The more penetrating question is who trusts you?  Imagine if you could grow trust in an environment of ever decreasing trust.  What a competitive advantage that would be.  It is more important than ever for you to give people someone they can trust.  Starting with your self by behaving and leading in ways that inspire trust creates a ripple effect of influence.

Test this for yourself.  Think of the person you trust the most.  What is it like to work with or be with that person?  Do they have influence on you because you trust them?  Does it speed up business to work with them?  What IF?  What if, everyone on your team had that level of trust?  At worst it would be a lot more energizing to work together.  At best trust makes the playing field really fast and becomes a performance multiplier that has a ripple effect on your team and your organization.

So much talk about change.  Seems like change is like re arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Changing the contents rather than the context.  Change re arranges the contents of the BOX while true transformation takes place outside the box and expands the box.  The edge of what you don’t know you don’t know.  The Speed of Trust is a transformative influence not a intellectual one.  Your credibility is based on your behavior–your walk not just your talk.  Transformation is experiential and is a change of heart and behavior not just a change in thought.  Ultimately you transform your track record by behaving your way out of problems,  not talking your way out.  As with Susan Boyle’s dramatic example–RESULTS convert the cynics!

The Globe and Mail is considered Canada’s national paper with over 1 million readers.  Stephen was interviewed by Sarah Boesveld last week and his remarks appeared in today’s Globe and Mail in an article entitled Ambiguity Anxiety.   Stephen had this to say about the pressure on trust in the current crisis when managers are secretive: ”They tend to be done without very much openness, without very much transparency – people in rooms all day long behind closed doors. And when they emerge, managers dish out spin and don’t give employees the straight goods,” he says.

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?

“By virtue of its immensity, the global effort to restore trust will… almost certainly succeed.”  Business WeekJames C. Cooper, Senior Editor and Economist, for BusinessWeek  actually said this in an article in BusinessWeek last October but it rings with new hope in light of the unprecedented stimulus package signed in my home town of Denver today. The Stimulus package violates my sense of the free market principles but may be better than the alternative of letting market forces bankrupt miss guided companies as it would in a normal market. It is a slippery slope, however.  The medicine may prove to be worse than the illness.  Not holding organizations and individuals accountable for their actions is a clear violation of market trust.   James Cooper clearly described the problem:  “Individual governments are rapidly filling in the details as they move unilaterally to address their own needs, but with the common purpose of attacking the broader problem of eroding confidence in the financial system. Modern finance, in which a relatively small base of capital supports a much larger volume of credit, depends on three things: sufficient capital among banks, liquidity to keep funds flowing, and trust that everyone will get paid. The problem with this financial trinity is that trust is not only dependent on the first two, but also turns on human emotion. Too much fear can bring down the house. By virtue of its immensity, the global effort to restore trust will almost certainly succeed.”

I remain optimistic that keeping a cool head and having a propensity to trust the free market system will ultimately right the global economy.  We each have to do our part to restore confidence by behaving in ways that inspire trust.  We also must spend and invest and act as if we believe in the system.  I have confidence that just like the savings and loan crisis, the dot com bubble, 9/11, and numerous other market disruptions in recent history, that the economy will recover more quickly than the press would have us believe but only if we each step up in our own circle of influence and restore trust and confidence. 

Previously I mentioned that I was reading Jeff Jarvis’ new book What Would Google Do?  I was just struck by his comments on market trust: “Leaders in government, news media, corporations, and universities think they and their institutions can own trust when, of course, trust is given to them.  Trust is earned with difficulty and lost with ease….Trust is an act of opening up; it’s a mutual relationship of transparency and sharing.  The more ways you find to reveal yourself and listen to others, the more you will build trust, which is your brand.”  We of course, agree whole heartedly.  Jeff does an excellent job of giving us a glimpse of the implications of violating trust in a post google transparent world.  His experience with Dell is worth the price of the book alone. How we behave in this financial crisis will effect our credibility, reputation and brand for years to come.  Are you behaving in ways that inspire the trust of your stakeholders, especially your customers?  

I will resist the almost overwhelming temptation to quote Jeff further and will instead, again, strongly urge you to read this book right away.  In times of trouble we need to challenge ourselves to get better and to reframe our thinking.  Jeff provokes new thinking that I believe, regardless of your profession or industry, will either excite you about the possibilities of the future or scare you enough to confront reality and change your expectations.  You know I read a lot of business books so I have a somewhat informed judgement.  I predict that this is another Tipping Point  and as such will top the business lists for years to come.

Jeff Jarvis explores that question as a window on the future market reality in his very compelling new book of the same name.  What Would Google Do? is thought provoking on many levels.  As our friend Seth Godin says “Five years from now, many people are going to regret the fact that they didn’t read this book today, when they had the chance.”  I feel the same way.  I can’t put it down.  Read it before your competition does.

Our friend Paul Allen an internet entreprenuer extraordinaire,  quoted The Speed of Trust in a very interesting explanation of the power of referrals on his blog entitled The Power of LinkedIn and The Speed of Trust.   Paul is one of the brightest minds we know and you will enjoy his insights on the potential of social networking from a marketing perspective.

Klaus Schwab, Chairman and Founder, World Economic Forum had this to say  “The Speed of Trust… is even more relevant in the world we have seen evolving over the last months. Congratulations and thank you!” 

Mellisa Long & Stephen M. R. Covey

Stephen M.R. Covey talks about what role trust plays in business and relationships.  Stephen was interviewed by Mellissa Long on CNN about trust in themarketplace. 

“The most precious asset of all is something that if lost, can only be
restored not by words, but by actions, that is the asset of Trust and
confidence “    British Prime Minister Gordon Brown CNN Oct 13th 2008

As I see it, the ultimate value of the Social Networks is still up for grabs even though it is growing worldwide.  The potential fatal flaw is that rather than enhancing your reputation you may damage it by loosely giving access to your most trusted relationships.   Consider this: Do you have a multiple year, deep trusted relationship with your social network friends or a 1 year acquaintance repeated multiple times?  With Trust depth matters.

Social networks are filled with loose mutual acquaintances but rarely our most trusted influencers.  Why?  Because it would violate the very level of trust the relationship is based on to openly expose your most influential high trust relationships to random access from others you barely know!  This is the same reason customers are reluctant to risk their reputation by referring their trusted colleagues and friends to salespeople.  The speed of your trust and reputation, your social capital and influence, resides in your carefully nurtured “Trustwork”™ not your loose network of acquaintances.  Mix the two haphazardly and you risk your reputation with your most trusted friends.  Many of the acquaintances in your social networks, are simply “potential” candidates for you to up-level and earn deep mutual respect with, and they with you,  by demonstrating consistent behavior over time that inspires each person’s trust.   Facebook,  Linkedin and others provide a rich opportunity to meet new friends trusted by people you trust.  This  is the ultimate value of networking. In fact research shows that loose acquaintances were more likely to lead to a job referral. So social networks do have value.  Just be sure to extend smart trust and check new friends track records before introducing them to your Trustwork™ of long nurtured high trust relationships until they earn that extraordinary level of trust.

The game of friending anyone and everyone to show a large network number also seems risky.  Clarify your expectations and think of how you would like others to access you. Build your network strategically based on your objectives.  The intent of the network providers is to attract eyeballs and mindshare any way they can and find ways to monetize that attention.  The jury is still out on how they will do that.  Meanwhile, we are trusting them with considerable information so be smart out there.

Yang Yuanqing

Stephen was pleased to speak again to Yang Yuanqing, Chairman of the Board of Lenovo.  Lenovo is rapidly becoming a major global brand after acquiring the IBM PC and as the one of the lead sponsors of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.  This merger was one of the most visable multinational mergers between a Chinese and a U. S. firm.  Stephen first met Yang Yuanqing when Stephen led a global executive team 2 day  meeting for Lenovo last year.  They have an impressive collection of talent and an excellent product and are poised to be a powerful force in their industry.  Of note is the decision that Lenovo made to drop IBM from their product  branding long before their rights to use the IBM name expired in their contract.   This was a bold vote of confidence in their global brand and reputation.  Well done!

Yang Yuanqing is a local rock star of business much as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are in the U.S.  He was mobbed by dozens of press and TV cameras as he left the stage.  Stephen managed to speak to him for several minutes. Yang was genuinely pleased to see Stephen again.  We gave him as set of the Speed of Trust 13 behavior cards translated into Chinese.

QQ.com is the #1 internet portal in China reaching over 90% of all web users in China with over 273 million active accounts.  That is nearly the entire population of the U.S. or Europe both children and adults!  In a lengthy interview Stephen and I were struck by the similarities of the questions and the high level of interest in the topic of Trust consistent with what we experience in other countries.  There was no sense of caution as the interviewer pointed out the low levels of trust that still exist in China between the government and business. The Speed of Trust is published in both simple and Complex Chinese and is selling well.  

Stephen emphasized the common ground of the topic of trust in relationships with team members from various nations.  He pointed out that the 13 behaviors of high trust leaders are common to leaders around the globe regardless of nationality.  There was significant interest in Stephen’s assertion that trust many times can be restored  or to a great degree improved after it is broken.  It is not black and white.  This resonated as a hopeful concept for China as they tend to consider dire consequences to loosing face or damaging your family or business reputation.  Stephen also discussed the gains in market trust and brand reputation gained by China due to their hosting the Olympics.  The national pride in China fueled by the Olympics and rising economics is evident in conversations with local leaders. 

Come visit us at SHRM! The Society for Human Resource Management’s

60th Annual International Conference

June 22-25, 2008 in Chicago, Illinois

Preview our new Speed of Trust DVDs, 

and meet Stephen at booth # 5320.

Richard Branson is the most surprising new addition to the top 20.  A deserving one at that.  It is interesting the new balance of power between Academia, Business Consultants, Business leaders and now journalists. Erin White in an insightful commentary for The Wall Street Journal touts a new breed of Guru.

We of course, are delighted to see Dr. Covey still in the top ten after all these years.  Dr. C is “still crazy after all these years” as Paul Simon would say. One of the most memorable insights he taught me years ago is that “each great class teeters on the edge of chaos”. Well said.  His 7 Habits of Highly Effective People  still dances on and off the bestseller lists this year nearly 20 years after its publication.

We would all do well to be life long learners at the feet of these remarkable mentors and hundreds of others like them.  Re-read their books and articles.

Fortune Magazine’s 2007 100 Best Places to Work found “…that trust between managers and employees is the primary defining characteristic of the very best workplaces.” This is based on the major findings of 20 years of research according to their research partner. 

Three of the five criteria for Fortune’s annual best workplaces top 100 are based on trust and the other two are strongly correlated to trust.

New York Times Bestseller

CEO Read recently named The Speed of Trust as the #1 most read business book by CEO’s and executives for 2007.  We are honored and feel this speaks to the ever growing relevance of Trust in todays Global Marketplace.

The New York Times reviewed The Speed of Trust and called Stephen M. R. Covey the next potential business sage and guru, citing The Speed of Trust as “the most intriguing business book of fall 2006.”