Trust Institute

Welcome to The Trust Institute: the non-profit Center for all things trust-related.

Trusted Advisor Associates is proud to offer this service at no cost to those in business and the world who are interested in the broad issue of trust.

At present, there are two major components of the Trust Institute:

• the TQ^SM or Trust Quotient^SM self-assessment quiz. You know your IQ; you probably know your EQ; shouldn’t you know your TQ?
• The Trust Resources Library: A new, cross-indexed, searchable, URL-linked, abstracted database of over 400 sources broadly related to trust. Resources range from philosophic theory to business texts; from personal to political; from historical to current.

These are just the first offerings of the Trust Institute. We thank you for visiting, and welcome your comments.

More on the Trust Resources Library

Who can Use it: Anyone. It’s free, and doesn’t even require registration. In particular, managers, students, consultants, strategists, and trainers no longer have to re-invent the wheel when dealing with trust.

Who Maintains It: Trusted Advisor Associates is funding the Trust Resources Library (TRL). It is also user-recursive—that is, we invite you to contribute more resources to the TRL site. Think of TRL as a wikipedia for trust. (We will retain editorial approval). There is no charge (or revenue) for adding your sources, though we will identify you as contributor for accepted items (you can also opt out if you prefer).

Why a Center for Resources on Trust? In the business world, as well as the world at large, trust is becoming more, not less, important as a vehicle for economic and political success. Greater trust offers great savings in cost, time and quality, as well as improving relationships.

There are three forces driving the need to better understand trust:

• the world is getting more linked—we must deal with others more often, and better
• horizontal external relationships are replacing vertical internal relationships—we are moving from a global managerial economy to an influence economy
• the same forces that link us also depersonalize those links; links without personal connection are suboptimal; links with connection create trust and trust creates value.

Yet our understanding of trust is limited, fragmented and hard to access. Until now, there has been no library, website or other forum devoted to the breadth of issues comprising the theory and practice of trust.

Go ahead—click. Take a spin around. Welcome to the Trust Resources Library.