John Newman heads a highly successful turnaround management company, focused on medium-sized companies. He’s a transplanted New Yorker, a UCLA MBA, with a CPA to boot. He lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas. And he defines the economics of trust beautifully. This story is taken from his website. Make sure you read the punchline at story’s end. […]
Fortune Magazine has a couple of blog columns. One is called Legal Pad, by Roger Parloff, Fortune’s Senior Editor for Legal Affairs. An experienced and educated journalist who writes well in what is normally an informative blog, Mr. Parloff recently posted what I take to be a temporary moral faux pas or blind spot. You […]
I long ago attended a sales call with my boss. When asked by the client, “what experience do you have doing this [narrowly defined] kind of work?” he shocked me by saying, “None that I can think of; what else would be useful for us to talk about?” How is it that we come to […]
Last week I suggested that listening was the necessary condition of most forms of persuasion: if you want to convince someone of something, you’re best advised to listen first to what they have to say. Here’s how Thomas Friedman put it: People often ask me how I, an American Jew, have been able to operate […]
While trust is experienced personally, it also happens within a given social context. Sometimes we take the context for granted. Other times, it intrudes on us in ways that make us re-frame trust. Blog-reader Martin, a semi-retired general management consultant who now resides in the Caribbean, points out how things can differ when, for example, […]
We trust individuals (or not). We also say we “trust” (or not) institutions—the SEC, Citibank, physicians (as a class), or business in general. Let’s talk about the latter. (Insert your favorite version of “trust in business is at an all-time low.”) Take the scandal du jour—options backdating—as an example (it’s tough to choose, what with […]
“Customer focus” has achieved the status of unquestioned business virtue. Hundreds of books and gurus attest to the power of customer focus to improve sellers’ business results. Customers benefit too by getting what they need. Ain’t it grand, how the invisible hand turns greed into social welfare? That’s the theory—but theory is getting stress-tested. A […]
Suppose you had to give a speech. To which audience would you rather present? The National Speakers Association The International Listening Association Microsoft The NSA might sound the most intimidating. Then again, they’d probably empathize. Microsoft would probably be the worst—doing email and blackberries throughout. Which makes me think, “hey, the ILA would probably be […]
law lawyers trust
One of Harvard Business Review’s all-time best-selling articles is Ted Levitt’s “Marketing Myopia.” It sold 850,000 reprints from its 1960 publication to Levitt’s death earlier this year. Re-read today, it looks more like strategy than marketing. His claim that the railroads failed to see they were in the transportation business is bigger-picture than what most […]