Posts

Hip to Be Square at Roundball

/2 Comments/in /by

Last post I talked about a possible trend against cynicism. Well, when it rains, it pours.

Mark Slatin tells us what happened at halftime at a recent Maryland Terrapins vs. Wake Forest basketball game.

I’ll just let Mark tell this story in his words:

The PA announcer introduced student contestants for the Pep Boys Fan Challenge. These two young men were competing for a year of free windshield washer fluid. I couldn’t make this stuff up! Regardless of where you sat that night, any fan could tell that both competitors had enjoyed their share of super sized Pepsi’s and grande nacho cheese tortillas.

The winning contestant would need to complete a “speed drill”. The goal? Dribble the ball from under one basket to the foul-line and back, then to the half-court line and back, then to the other foul-line and back, and finally to the far base-line before finishing with a successful basket.

The labored breathing started for both men as soon as they hit the first foul-line. As they reached the half-court line, one appeared to glance upward to see if an oxygen mask would mercifully drop from the Jumbotron. As they headed for the final turn, one warrior had gained, what they call in football, separation, from the other – nearly the full length of the court.

At this point, fans started to cheer. Not for the apparent victor, but to support the guy who was grasping onto hope…just to finish.

Then it happened.

The contestant who was gliding to an easy victory slowed down about eight feet in front of the basket, got down on all fours, and waited for his competitor, a complete stranger, to approach. As the athletically-challenged straggler huffed and puffed his way toward his competitor, he saw the offering of a human trampoline in front of the basket. Hands and knees now firmly planted on the hardwood floor, the first contestant pointed up to his own back.

The anticipation and noise level escalated as he neared with slow motion speed. Without breaking stride, the newly anointed crowd-darling picked up steam, took a final dribble, jumped on the back of the first contestant and slam dunked the ball to an erupting Comcast Center crowd.

Unexpected.
Unnecessary.
Unselfish.

Both men hugged and held each other’s hand in the air in victory as the video camera sent their image to the arena mega-screens. The Terps went on to win the basketball game; but, these men were the real victors that night.

By humbling ourselves and not seeking the spotlight, we build trust.

By giving credit instead of taking it ourselves (especially when we can), we build trust.

By doing what is unexpected, unnecessary and unselfish, we build trust; capturing the hearts of everyone in our arena. The one-year supply of windshield washer fluid is just a bonus.

What Mark said.

Fighting Cynicism

/3 Comments/in /by

I often want to be hip and in the know.  I don’t think I’m the only one.  And frequently this urge manifests itself in sarcasm, cynicism or being snide.

Are we living in a time where this urge is perhaps more prevalent than others? So much so that we’re beginning to see a backlash?

Some see the Obama phenoma as evidence of such a backlash.  I’ll abstain from that debate.  Besides, I’ve got a better piece of evidence.

In Advertising Age —‘of all places,’ I’m tempted to say—we find Snide Advertising is Bad for Business and Society,  by Richard Rapaport. He dissects some of the snarkier, hipper ads on TV today—ads by FedEx, Budweiser, Priceline.com.

I don’t think of advertising as a bastion of expansive social thinking; much less of a philosophy linking social well-being and business profits. I think of it as a center of cynicism, actually. And yet, read these few snippets (and remember, this writing appears in Advertising Age):
 

There are few barometers so reflective of modern life as TV advertising. It makes sense. Take the culture’s most facile minds, challenge them to pry cash from an increasingly tapped-out audience, and what do you get? Commercials built on sadism, on derision, on one-upsmanship — in a word, "snide."

If you look up "snide," you find synonyms such as "sarcastic" and "malicious." Snide advertising possesses a governing syntax that demands, to begin with, sacrificial victims…

Another building block of snide advertising is physical aggression…

Snideness is the leitmotif of sexy slapstick that predominates in ads for domestic beer bottlers, the bottom feeders of American advertising…

The bottom line of snide advertising is a kind of Darwinian "survival of the snappiest," requiring that you get the last word in any exchange and that it be a "gotcha."

… the crux of snide advertising [is] the ability to communicate that you and your product are too hip to so much as work up a spit to actually sell the merch; that the very process of making the ad, like most other human endeavors these days, is barely worth the effort.

…It behooves marketing professionals to understand the difference between subtle irony and idiot snideness and aim for an advertising denominator cognizant of the maxim that expansive, confident consumers part with their cash far more readily than do angry, fearful ones.

When the purveyors of pitch are telling us not to foul the nest—maybe there’s something going on?

Trust Is the New Leadership In A Flat World

/5 Comments/in /by

Thomas Friedman’s book The World is Flat is an absurdly great best-seller.

It was a best-seller when printed in 2005, and as of today it’s still ranked #112 on Amazon. That’s a lotta bananas.

I don’t recall if Friedman ever defines “flat”—but it is an apt adjective.

“Flat” conveys the sense of “level playing field,” as in markets opening up to competitors from everywhere. It suggests a levelling of wages and prices, for the same reason. And it certainly conveys the feeling of lots and lots of interaction between buyers and sellers.

But enough about Friedman. Here’s what “flat” says to me.

Business used to be about stable, vertically organized, fire-walled, corporate entities—which competed against each other. That was business.

Not any more.

In the “flat” world, we don’t have corporations—we have supply chains. The vast majority of the auto industry’s costs are purchased costs. I’m told that when Tata set out to design a sub-$2500 car, they didn’t call a company meeting—they called a supply chain meeting.

The old job of leaders and managers—to organize (largely hierarchical) efforts within the walls of the Good Ole Corporation—is disappearing.

The new job is being done by supply chain managers, customer relationship managers, key account sales managers, and field engineers.

And that new job is not about directing people over whom you have control—it is about influencing those over whom you have absolutely no control whatsoever.

Trust is the new leadership.

It’s no longer about how you measure, motivate and inspire those beneath you or with the same W-2 form as you. It’s about how you connect with, help, and serve those with whom you interact in the Great Outside World.

Trust is the new leadership.

It’s no longer about how you help those who depend on you. It’s about how you help those on whom you depend.

And there’s the rub. Our old leadership models were internal; it was OK to help your people—after all, you all worked for Good Ole Corp.

But in old-think strategy, the customer and the supplier are your competitors too (think Five Forces model). Don’t share your cost information; contract for everything; you get what you bargain for; check with the lawyers.

In a flat world, old-think strategy runs smack up against new-think leadership.

In a flat world, you actually have to trust your supply chain. Your supply chain is your friend, not your enemy.

It’s no mistake Davos this year was all about collaboration. Collaboration is the new competition.

And trust is the new leadership.

Like old “internal” leadership, it comes with a paradox. If you focus on serving others, you will be served yourself. But if you set out to serve yourself by the “means” of serving others, you will be found out.

Decaying Social Trust and Moral Indignation

/8 Comments/in /by

Pop quiz!

Who wrote: “This is how the world will end—not with a bang, but a whimper.”

a. T.S. Eliot
b. W. H. Auden
c. Robert Frost
d. e.e. cummings
e. Alfred E. Neumann

Answer at the end; no fair peeking.

I don’t know about the world, but the subprime/mortgage/credit crisis shows how social trust ends. Not with a whimper, but with righteous moral indignation—on all sides.

We are in the midst of the deflation of a debt or credit bubble, itself based on an asset bubble—overpriced houses. As of today, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association, 24% of subprime mortgages are delinquent or in foreclosure; ditto for 4% for prime mortgages; and for all mortgages it’s a record 7.9%, the highest since records began in 1979.

Everyone played musical chairs. And the more frantic the music, the more rightous the talk.

Here’s the Heritage Foundation—mind you, just last November, 2007—demonstrating its utter subordination of logic to ideology, arguing against H.R. 3915, a House bill to reign in predatory lending:

[the bill] would establish an explicit series of credit standards for lenders, which could have the effect of excluding many moderate income borrowers from the ownership market. In sum, the enactment of H.R.3915 would delay the housing market recovery that is now struggling to get underway.

Yup, Congress killed the real estate bubble appreciating market.

A year earlier, in September 2006, the Mortgage Bankers Association stated that

“the subprime market has evolved dramatically in recent years, providing significant benefits to consumers…increasing regulation could decrease competition and increase rates that the subprime market offers consumers.”

But this is not a populist rant.  Consumers were far from just hapless victims.

An FBI Mortgage Fraud report 3 months ago stated that up to 70% of early payment defaults may have been linked to buyer misrepresentation on loan applications.

What about FICO credit scores?  Courtesy of BusinessWeek, meet “credit doctors,” companies who will manipulate credit ratings by blitzing credit agencies with disputes about old reports (which have likely been lost), setting you up as an “authorized user” of an account owned by someone with good credit, or just creating paper accounts.

“All legal,” they protest. Of course. No miscreants here.

So—end game—bang or whimper?

Dateline, CBS Evening News February 12, 2008.  Meet Karen T., a married San Francisco suburbanite who bought a condo as a second home for $505K, financing it 100% with mortgage debt. Now it’s worth $340K, and her adjustable mortgage goes up $900 this June.

They own another home. They can afford the rate increase. So—what to do?

Karen’s answer?  Walk away. Default.  Give it back to the bank.

Is Karen distraught? Not really. “I’m not doing anything illegal.  Everything’s negotiable in business—this is just another business decision. I don’t see why this is any different. I’m within my right to walk away from a bad deal.”

And 60% in an LA Times Real Estate blog poll agreed with her.

Karen is morally indistinguishable from a landlord turning off the heat under rent control; insurance companies withdrawing sole-provider coverage from unprofitable markets; banks charging usurious credit rates; emergency rooms turning out the uninsured; de facto mortgage redlining; and a thousand forms of “fine print."  Or—come to think of it—from a banker foreclosing on a never-should’ve-approved-that-loan loan. 

The rallying cry is always, “I’m not doing anything illegal.”

But here’s the kicker.

Karen’s not morally indignant about walking away. To her, that’s “a business decision.”

No, her moral indignation is reserved for the consequences she might face.  She leans her face on her hand, her voice intensifying, as she says, “It is devastating to think that my credit scores are going to drop 200 points," she said.

OMG, it’s just so, like, unfair!

Huh? Devastated because you were educated, had the money, and placed a 100% bet on an overheated market—and lost? And you can afford to pay the piper—but don’t want to?

Take a trip to Vegas, Karen, and see if the blackjack dealers buy it.  Better yet, go tell it to someone with half your education and income who’s been foreclosed on after having spent their last money trying to pay the bank. 

It doesn’t matter who started the food fight.  It seems that the decay of social trust is accompanied by higher levels of self-righteousness and narcissism on both sides.

When business and consumer alike choose moral bankruptcy over financial bankruptcy—without even thinking about it—and then justify it indignantly through Darwinian arguments—well, Houston, we’ve got a problem in trust-land.  Not to mention ethics-land. 

Oh yeah—T.S. Eliot. 
 

Lying to Get the Sale

/9 Comments/in /by

Suzanne Lowe, at The Expertise Marketplace, has a provocative post titled I Told the Truth—and Got Hired Anyway.

Briefly, she faced two sales situations in which she knew she’d be asked the inevitable question: what experience do you have working in our business?

The truthful answer boiled down to, “none at all.”  Since we all know this is the “wrong” answer, it took a certain amount of courage for Suzanne to speak the truth, and even more courage to then avoid rushing into the silence to list the dozens of reasons why she was nonetheless the best for the job, etc.

The punch line in Suzanne’s posting was, of course, that she got the job. And she asked her readers to help explain why.

Now, what I find curious is not the fact that she got the job—but her readers’ explanations for it.

To me, the reason she got the job seemed transparently clear, almost self-evident.  She got the job because she immediately proved she was honest, transparent, truthful—and those personal characteristics in this case outweighed the importance of industry experience—as they frequently, though not always, do.

Yet to my surprise other commenters had different explanations.  Their explanations included:

• Maybe the client saw the greater relevance of her experience in other industries
• This may be the rare client who is not risk-averse
• Maybe lack of industry knowledge meant no bias, hence an open mind—ignorance here is a plus
• Maybe her integrity helped feed a broader sense of chemistry about her

My first reaction to these other reasons (I’m trying to be honest here), was one of disbelief.   It’s always shocking to me when other people don’t see things precisely the way I do.  ("How could these people not see"…."Why don’t they understand…"). 

I mean, don’t you know who I think I am?

Yet, I know some of these commenters. They are bright, experienced, knowledgeable people.

Unfortunately, this means I am denied access to my preferred, first-blush, gut-instinct explanation for why they might disagree with me, namely they’re ignorant fools. (“Damn; I have to take these opinions seriously.”)

So, I have two questions for this audience.

1. What do you make of Suzanne’s tale; why do you think her clients in each case bought her services despite her lack of industry credentials?

2. What do you make of my being shocked at the other answers? What’s your first reaction when you find out someone has a different reaction to something you felt was obvious? And what do you do about it?

Carnival of Trust for February is Up

/0 Comments/in /by

Carnival of TrustThe February 2008 Carnival of Trust is now online, hosted by Michelle Golden and her blog Golden Practices.

Each month, the (rotating) host selects the Top Ten trust-related blog postings from across the web during the prior month. Subject areas include Advising and Influencing, Sales and Marketing, Leadership and Management, and Strategy, Economics and Policy.

I want to say pointedly how great this Carnival thing is.  Maybe you never heard the word "carnival" applied to blogs before.  All it means is a compilation of other blogs.

But as with all things internet-related—there are compilations, and there are compilations.  If you like casually searching the web for interesting stuff, the best click you can make is onto a really good Carnival.  And here’s why this one is turning out so well.

First, we limit the posts to 10.  This is the Top 10 list, the very best of the blogosphere, for anything vaguely related to trust last month.

Second, we get great hosts.  It’s not me that picks the Top 10, it’s the fine people who bring their own special expertise—marketing, consulting, intellectual property, selling, communications—and apply that expertise to the selection.

Third, those great hosts have a Point of View.  They add zing and zest and perspective to the already-good material they’ve selected.

Think of reading the Carnival of Trust as like skimming the NYTimes Book Review, if you like that; or the category leaders in Amazon; or some kind of Google-scanning with mind-reading software that filters out everything but what is Really Great for You and You Alone (if you like trust, that is).

If you can’t tell, I’m excited about the way the Carnival of Trust has been evolving.  Do yourself a favor and pop over to the carnival, hosted by Michell Golden this month,  and treat yourself to a good quick  read.

Banks Behaving Badly: Or Is It Just Me?

/11 Comments/in /by

You know how it goes.

The phone rings. It doesn’t show a caller ID, just a number. There’s a lag between when I say “hello” and someone comes on the line.

Why don’t I hang up right then? I really don’t know. My motives are opaque to me, but probably diseased.

This time it’s BankAmerica. They tell me there’s nothing wrong, my credit card has not been compromised—but hey, you never know!

Because they care about my security, they’re going to send me a credit report—free! Which I can then examine, and send in any corrections required.

In addition, they will send me—with no obligation! –an identity theft insurance policy, to protect all my cards. And all I have to do, if I foolishly decide not to take them up on this amazing offer, is to phone them within 30 days to say no thanks.

Otherwise, of course, they’ll bill me, in simple monthly installments, renewable automatically on an annual basis.

I assume that BankAmerica (and anyone else pulling this passive-aggressive “gotcha” marketing strategy) must have a high complaint rate, as people notice that it’s an opt-out, rather than an opt-in offer, and find an unexpected bill in their statement. And I assume that they end up reversing a lot of those “misunderstandings.”

Is it just me? Or does anyone else find this tactic not only annoying, but self-defeating?

What does BankAmerica (or any other bank) gain by having its name linked to a “sales” tactic associated with old record clubs and internet porn subscriptions?

Who is the analyst in the back room at BankAmerica (or any other bank) crunching the benefit/cost ratio of insurance fee income to the cost of processing returns?

Does it occur to him to factor in the cost to the brand? The drip-drip of negative reputation? The effect on BankAmerica’s deposit accounts? Its mortgage business?

And if not, why isn’t he being fired for destroying shareholder value? Because the market honestly does know how to distinguish between companies with good customer reputations, and those with bad ones.

Then again, BankAmerica just bought up Countrywide Financial, the nation’s largest subprime mortgage borrower—because, at these prices, it was a “good deal.”

Not for B of A’s mortgage business’s reputation. Countrywide’s own reputation can’t have added to BofA’s reputation among consumers.

Does reputation matter? I’d like to think it ultimately does. Read the comments to the above ABC News link, and see how many people are down on BofA as a lender. They can vote with their feet.
And now here I am complaining about their telemarketing, letting my fingers do the walking.

What about you?

If you decide not to continue reading this wonderful blog, all you have to do is write in and comment, and there’ll be no charge whatsoever.

Otherwise, I’ll simply bill you in painless monthly installments, renewable automatically every year unless you decide to notify me otherwise, whenever you want.

Trust me!

Call for Submissions for the February Carnival of Trust

/0 Comments/in /by

carnival of trust image

Every month the Carnival of Trust highlights ten of the best posts on trust, whether business related or not. The next carnival will be Monday February 4th. If you’ve written a post you think would be a good fit, or if you have read a post by someone else that you think would be great for the carnival I’d like to encourage you to submit it for the carnival. This month’s host is Michelle Golden of Golden Practices.

Carnival Submission Guidelines:

  1. The Deadline for submissions is midnight, Thursday, January 31st.
  2. Posts do not have to be business related. Trust in personal relationships, politics, or any other sphere of life are more than welcome, and, indeed, encouraged.

Posts can be submitted here.

If you’d like to read a sample Carnival of Trust, both the Carnival of Trust homepage lists all prior carnivals. I look forward to another excellent edition with your help.

What the Pharmaceutical Industry Must Do to Regain Trust

/2 Comments/in /by

Pharma has been taking it on the chin for some time now.  It’s been targeted by activists, bloggers, politicians and reformers. Next to Wall Street, it’s one of today’s least trusted industries.

 
But until last week, much of the industry’s response had the flavor of, “if people only knew the whole story,” or “they just don’t appreciate the good we do.”

Fair enough, perhaps.  But no longer good enough.

Last week, the industry drew negative cover-page articles in two iconic, industry-friendly major publications.

Et tu, Advertising Age? From the trade magazine of an industry that benefits enormously from Pharma comes this tabloid-like headline:

Vytorin Ad Shame Taints Entire Marketing Industry

 

Cholesterol Drug’s Ad Campaign Turns Into PR Nightmare, Fanning Flames of Public Mistrust of DTC.

Reports that Merck & Co. and Schering-Plough Corp. kept under wraps for more than a year findings that Vytorin does not deliver results it spent more than $100 million advertising to consumers is much more than a PR disaster for the drug’s co-marketers. Coming on the heels of a New York Times story that Pfizer’s $2 billion drug Lyrica treats a condition, fibromyalgia, that a lot of doctors don’t think exists, the Vytorin news is fanning the flames of public mistrust for the $5 billion direct-to-consumer drug industry — and the ad business in general.

"The pharmas are in big trouble in terms of credibility," said brand expert Rob Frankel, who runs his own consultancy at RobFrankel.com. "They’re just above Congress and used-car salesmen."

Talk about biting the hand that feeds you.

But the topper has to be making the cover story on BusinessWeek:  Do Cholesterol Drugs Do Any Good?

 

Never mind the typically well-researched and well-written critique of the industry; never mind the bad press Merck and Schering-Plough got for the Vytorin data, coming on the heels of the Vioxx lawsuits; never mind the bevy of critical testimonials the article digs up.

The plain fact is, once Ad Age and BusinessWeek put you on their covers—in nakedly negative terms—it’s time for some basic re-examination.  Low trust is not a surprise to the industry—but this is a wake-up call about the failure of the industry’s response to date.

One of the major pharmaceutical firms (because it’s not likely to be PhRMA, the industry’s trade association) needs to find a voice and take a leadership role—to speak what has become obvious to the world outside Pharma, as represented by leading business publications.

The message is this: the only way to resolve the industry’s trust issues is to become trustworthy—worthy of trust.

• Trust will not be regained by “educating” the public.

• Trust will not be regained by “getting the message out.”

• Trust will not be regained by improving your PR; your PR will be improved by regaining your trust.

• Trust will not be regained by framing it as a problem of image, marketing, or perception.

• Trust will not be regained by coordinating, refining or sharpening talking points; the problem is not getting the message out—it’s listening to the market to hear the message coming in.

The good news is, there are a great number of very well-intentioned, smart people in this industry, who are deeply pained at having been demonized the way they have been.  Some are courageously beginning to face up to it.

It won’t be easy for them. Twenty years of success, blockbuster drugs, and an overdose of marketing culture erects barriers to even their good intent.

Further, any gain in trustworthiness must be broad-based.

It won’t be enough just to help sales forces become listeners, rather than shills—though that will help. It isn’t enough to wean physicians from the “consulting” and “education” fees they reap—though that will help. It isn’t enough to deal with the appearance of conflict in researchers and journals’ affiliations with pharma funding—though that will help. It isn’t enough to seek business models beyond patent-stretching, features-tweaking and disease creation—though that will surely help. 

It is an industry whose beliefs and practices have become encrusted, making its untrustworthiness opaque even to those who most sincerely would reform it.

So, what will it take?

• Courage, for one. Which does exist; there are some fine people in pharma.

• Brains, for aother. Again, pharma is blessed. The trick is to turn those brains loose; to use the courage to think boldly, examine anew.

• Transparency is required too, though even that is hampered by layers of regulation brought upon itself by the industry’s own past practices.

• But above all, the industry needs a sense of urgency.  Not just business urgency, but a personal willingness to face some  shame, or disgust, or revulsion; something that comes from the gut and says, “you know, we are better than this; we can do better than this; and I for one have had it.”

I can’t think of any industry where the trust gap between what is and what could be is larger, and where the social cost of that gap is greater. It is in society’s best interest to have a trusted pharmaceutical industry. At its best, the pharmaceutical industry saves hundreds of thousands of lives, and adds quality of life to millions.   We are paying gazillions in cost, red tape, suspicion, and lost or devalued lives because of its absence.

We should all be rooting for this industry to heal itself.

The first step is admitting you’ve got a problem.

When Trust Betrayal Keeps Coming Back

/5 Comments/in /by

Cobalt57 has a half-life of 257 days. The half-life of a bad divorce ranges from a few years to a lifetime.

And the half-life of betrayed trust is somewhere beyond that.

In fact, trust betrayed has a way of regenerating. Call it Zombie trust: when trust is trashed, it has a way of never really dying—it just keeps on coming back to get you.

Trust Betrayal and the Black Community

Two cases in point. From the early 1930s until 1972, a government sponsored study of syphilis in Tuskegee, Alabama systematically and intentionally lied to poor black sharecroppers about the “research” being done to help them. In fact, their infection was left untreated, so as to study the ravaging effects of the disease.

The study is pretty well-known in the black community, and is a powerful story about the depth, depravity and reality of racism in the USA.

Powerful enough that it has made black people afraid of taking part in medical clinical trials. It’s not hard to understand why. And yet, we have this news story:

In a report to be published in the journal Medicine online Jan. 14, experts in the design and conduct of medical research found that black men and women were only 60 percent as likely as whites to participate in a mock study to test a pill for heart disease. Results came from a random survey of 717 outpatients at 13 clinics in Maryland, 36 percent of whom were black and the rest white.

"The survey is believed to be the first analysis showing that an overestimation of risk of harm explains why blacks’ participation in clinical trials has for decades lagged that of whites. The results come at a time of increased recognition of racial differences in disease rates and treatments. Researchers point out that some kidney diseases, stroke, lung cancer and diabetes all progress more quickly in blacks and kill more blacks than people of other racial backgrounds.

"There is enormous irony that without African-American subject participation in clinical trials, we are not going to have tested the best therapies we need to treat African Americans," says study senior researcher, Hopkins internist and epidemiologist Neil R. Powe, M.D., M.P.H., M.B.A. "So long as the legacy of Tuskegee persists, African Americans will be left out of important findings about the latest treatments for diseases, especially those that take a greater toll on African Americans and consequently may not have ready or equal access to the latest medicines."

The Zombie of Trust Betrayed is at work here. The past abuse of trust was so horrific that it continues to wreak havoc, even when—ironically—researchers could be of help.

Robert Zogby and the Polling Debacle

Here’s another case. After the New Hampshire Democratic primary polling debacle, Jon Stewart’s Daily Show invited famed controversial pollster Robert Zogby as a spokesman for the polling industry.

Zogby held his own in the unwinnable format—but the Zombie of Trust Betrayed got him—bad—a week later.

In a post on January 16, Rick Rottman recounts a first-hand story from 1992, when he took a European history course from Zogby at Utica College. Long story short, as Rottman tells it, Zogby offered to raise everyone’s grade a point if they came in and volunteered for an 8-hour shift at his polling business.

At first, everyone agreed to it. Later, everyone reneged. Pressed as to why, they all said they felt it was unethical. Zogby, as Rottman recounts it, blew a gasket.

Worse yet, says Rottman, he had gotten an A on his midterm before these events. He never saw the results of his final exam (on which he thought he had done well), but his final grade was a C—implying an improbable F on his final exam. Understandably, Rottman is inclined to wonder why.

That was 1992. Now, 16 years later, Rottman is in the blogosphere saying “John Zogby is the reason I don’t trust polls.” And it’s not hard to understand why.

Note: I want to be very careful about spreading critical comments like this. If Zogby has something to say, he’s got white space here in this column to do so. And if he convinces me Rottman is a nut job, then I’ll strip his story entirely out of this blog. Until then, however, Rottman is writing quite clearly about a first-hand experience which sounds credible to me—or I wouldn’t be citing and linking to him here.

Final examples of the half-life of mistrust: look to the Russian-Chechen conflict; the feelings between the Sunnis and the Shia.

Trust lasts a long time. Trust betrayed appears to last longer.