” . . . 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.

 

 ”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?

As the U.S. economy slows, it causes a global ripple effect.  When the going gets tough, budgets, projects, money, customers, and jobs gravitate to the “go-to” performers that are trusted.  High trust teams outperform low trust teams by as much as four times.  Why?  They execute at The Speed of Trust. 

Leading-edge companies are asking one important question in employee evaluations:  Do you trust your boss?  These companies have learned that the answer to this one question is more predictive of team and organizational performance than any other they might ask.  The number one reason for costly employee turnover is the relationship they have with their immediate supervisor.  We are facing a crisis of trust and business ethics.  In the U.S., only 51% of employees have trust and confidence in senior management.

Stephen M. R. Covey: I use a very simple definition of trust. By trust, I mean confidence. Confidence. The opposite of that–distrust–is suspicion.

See, I don’t trust someone if I’m suspicious about his motive or agenda or integrity. I do trust when I feel confident about it. It’s like Jack Welch said–I could give you a dictionary definition of trust, but you know it when you feel it. And what you feel is confidence.

60th Annual International Conference

June 22-25, 2008 in Chicago, Illinois

Preview our new Speed of Trust DVDs, 

and meet Stephen at booth # 5320.

The May 2008 edition of Chief Learning Officer (CLO) magazine featured The Speed of Trust in an article entitled: Trust is a Competency.   This prestigious magazine is well known by leading executives around the world.  CLO called trust “a critical characteristic that is more essential to business performance than ever.”   The article goes on to say: “Increasingly more and more, leaders today are ‘rediscovering’ trust as they begin to see it with new eyes.  Looking beyond the common view of trust as some soft, intangible, illusive social virtue, they’re learning to see it as a critical, highly relevant, and tangible asset.  They’re discovering that trust affects—and changes—everything within an organization…literally every dimension, every activity, every decision, every relationship.  They’re also beginning to recognize that trust is quite possibly the single most powerful and influential lever for leaders and organizations today.”

Stephen concludes the article with this practical advice for executives: “So what is the role of learning practitioners with respect to trust?  I suggest it’s three-fold, corresponding to the three ways of seeing trust with new eyes:  

First – always seek to frame trust within the organization in economic, not merely social, terms.  By creating a compelling business case for trust, you can engage organizational buy-in and make real improvement sustainable. 

Second – define leadership as ‘getting results in a way that inspires trust.’  In other words, personally model trust through character, competence, and demonstrated trust-building behavior.  By doing this, you become the starting place for increasing trust, and your trusted reputation becomes an additional currency that carries significant value in the new economy.  

Third – recognize and treat trust as a competency—as something you can do and create and measure—and help managers learn and understand how to behave in ways that establish, grow, extend, and (if needed) restore trust with all stakeholders.” 

Our close friend and colleague Joseph Grenny co-author of the New York Times best seller Crucial Conversations sent us this interesting snapshot into international trust printed in the Economist this week. It highlights the foundational bedrock of Trust in business.  Business,  whether B2B or with consumers demands a propensity to trust each others intentions.  IF that presumption of Trust is violated consistently and a propensity to be suspicious prevails it could grind our global economy to a halt.  The articles points out an interesting fact.  That there are actually less lawyers in the business sector in Japan,  perhaps signaling a higher propensity to trust.  The speed of growth that economies around the world are enjoying seems to be evidence that trust is again growing.  This story is a cautionary tale however, if we violate trust with each other in business our global economy could quickly shift from speed to friction.

The article contrasts the propensity to trust in the Japan compared to the west.  ”In the West, that culture is increasingly one of implicit mistrust. Deals require armies of lawyers and thick paper trails to give parties confidence, in spite of the time and money that such work entails. In Japan, by contrast, companies—some dating back centuries—regularly deal with long-standing partners; reputational concerns, rather than strictly legal ones, are paramount.”

Japanese finance

My bow is my bond
Apr 24th 2008 | TOKYO
From The Economist print edition

A wicked swindle exploits a soft spot in Japan’s business culture


TRUST is the bedrock of business everywhere, but the sources from which it springs are different. In Japan, where reputation and relationships are considered precious, the informal cues are as important as the legalistic ones. Parties take their time discussing deals. Managers meet to exchange meishi—their all-important business cards (usually presented with two hands)—and bow respectfully. It helps to establish confidence.
So it was that when a handful of bankers from Lehman Brothers met executives of Marubeni, one of Japan’s largest trading houses, at Marubeni’s headquarters across from the Imperial Palace last autumn, they never suspected that they were actually being drawn into a massive fraud. The teams had met numerous times to discuss a bridge loan. Reams of paperwork were supplied. In a convoluted agreement, Lehman provided more than $350m in financing to a small firm with ties to Marubeni (and founded by a cousin of the empress of Japan); the trading house guaranteed repayment.
Or did it? When Lehman contacted Marubeni after a payment was missed, Marubeni said that it had no idea what the bank was talking about. Marubeni has claimed that contracts signed and stamped by a Marubeni director were found to be forgeries and the manager whom Lehman’s bankers met in Marubeni’s offices was an impostor. Marubeni says the two employees who negotiated the deal were fired. Marubeni refuses to repay the money, claiming it is a victim of fraud itself. On March 31st Lehman sued Marubeni for $350m. Since the fraud was uncovered, more alleged victims have surfaced, such as Och-Ziff, an American private-equity firm, which is owed around $80m.
The case pits a company’s responsibility to supervise itself against the adequacy of the due diligence that investors must perform. The Japanese legal doctrine of “apparent authority” holds firms accountable for their employees’ actions, provided those actions are carried out within the scope of their normal work. Meanwhile, Lehman’s checks will come under scrutiny, not least by its own insurance company. Yet also on trial will be Japan’s business culture—and what constitutes trust in the world of finance.
In the West, that culture is increasingly one of implicit mistrust. Deals require armies of lawyers and thick paper trails to give parties confidence, in spite of the time and money that such work entails. In Japan, by contrast, companies—some dating back centuries—regularly deal with long-standing partners; reputational concerns, rather than strictly legal ones, are paramount. Business disputes rarely go to trial. The number of corporate lawyers is extremely low compared with other financial centres, and frauds by one party against another are exceedingly rare.
So when Lehman met Marubeni employees at the trading house’s offices, there was no reason to suspect anything was amiss. Many consider such a culture to be very beneficial to Japan. Yet the closer that Japan’s financial practices are to global standards, the more the informal ties of trust will be replaced with formal legal ones. Something will be gained, but something will be lost as well.

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.