Michael Lewis, Wall Street, and Trust

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Outsourcer?Right after Michael Lewis’s 60-Minutes appearance to promote his new book Flash Boys I wrote a blogpost about it.

The next day I received a phone call from a retail stock broker. His tone was somewhere between kindly uncle and exasperated old-timer, but his message was clear:

“That Lewis guy’s obviously got an axe to grind,” said the caller. “He lost big-time in the market and he’s trying to get even with people. And that Katsuyama guy he writes about, he’s just a spoiled baby, trying to make an even bigger buck than he was lucky to get paid in the first place. The whole thing is just a bunch of hype designed to sell books, and you’re getting suckered into it.”

If you know anything about the book (and if you don’t, here’s a good start), you know that’s a crock. In any case, my caller exhibited three traits:

  1. He’s convinced the world is of the dog-eat-dog variety,
  2. He’s convinced that everyone else believes the same thing,
  3. The default strategy therefore is do unto others before they do unto you.

My caller does not believe in people with different value systems. Let’s call such people “unicorns” Canadians.  (Did I mention Katsuyama is Canadian?)

Now, I suggest the odds of making my caller more trusting and  trustworthy through more regulations are roughly zero. The odds of making him trustworthy  through incentives, can be only slightly better (and I can’t even imagine the incentives).

The only way he’s ever likely to behave in a trusting and trustworthy manner is if he gets beat in a level playing field market by those who are capable of trusting and being trusted.

The Showdown on CNBC

The next day, Lewis and the book’s hero Brad Katsuyama appeared in a very confrontational spot on CNBC  with Bill O’Brien, President of BATS. BATS is an exchange that the book accused of being at the heart of misleading investors and supporting high frequency trading in a legal form of “front-running.”

O’Brien wasted no time throwing the first punch, leading off with:

O’Brien: Shame on you, Michael and Brad, shame on you both for falsely accusing literally thousands of people and possibly scaring millions of investors in an effort to promote a business model. It’s a very, very old tactic to try to build a business on the planks of fear, mistrust and accusation; this is certainly taking that to a new level. It reflects either an unwillingness – a continued lack of understanding about how this market operates or just unwillingness to acknowledge it, because you’re trying to launch a new business and you want to get volume for your platform…

Katsuyama: If you’re going to launch these accusations, let me ask – what market data do you use to price trades?

O’Brien:  We use direct feeds.

Katsuyama: No, you don’t. [You use SIP feeds]

O’Brien: Yes, we do [use direct feeds]

The very next day, the Wall Street Journal reported:

BATS Global Markets Inc., under pressure from the New York Attorney General’s office, corrected statements made by a senior executive during a televised interview this week about how its exchanges work…the exchange operator said two of its exchanges, EDGA and EGX, use a slower feed, known as the Securities Information Processor, to price trades.

This is what is known, in my circles as – technical term – being caught in a flat-out lie.

In any case, Mr. O’Brien exhibited the same three traits as my retail-level caller:

  1. He’s convinced the world is of the dog-eat-dog variety,
  2. He’s convinced that everyone else believes the same thing,
  3. The default strategy therefore is do unto others before they do unto you. Which of course is just what he tried to do.

O’Brien does not believe in people who believe in honesty or fair dealing; in other words, he does not believe in unicorns or Canadians – even when staring one in the face (did I mention that Katsuyama is Canadian?).

The odds of making O’Brien and his ilk more trustworthy through better regulations are roughly zero. The odds of making him trustworthy  through incentives, only slightly better (and I still can’t even imagine the incentives).

The only way he’s likely to behave in a trusting and trustworthy manner is if he gets beat in a level playing field market by those who are capable of trusting and being trusted.

And that is precisely what Brad Katsuyama is setting out to do in the development of a new exchange, IEX. Not a regulatory answer; not a new incentives answer; an answer based on the hope that enough customers in the market will actually choose to do business with an exchange that is unconflicted, that is transparent about its data, that offers only easy-to-understand offers, and that enforces a level playing field.

Will it work?  Stay tuned. There are some interesting positive signs, including even from (hold your breath) Goldman Sachs.

Trust on Wall Street

Having focused solely on trust in business for over 15 years now, several things are apparent to me.

1. The Mother Theresa Paradox is Real. The less trust exists in an industry, the less interested are the industry players in reforming it. It is the already-trust-conscious industries (and companies) who are convinced of trust’s value, and who are interested in improving it. This despite the fact that trust is an overwhelmingly powerful competitive advantage for anyone who can see it. Katsuyama’s new exchange will be a great test of that proposition.

By anybody’s measure (e.g. Edelman’s Trust Barometer), financial services are at the bottom of the trust list. Low hanging fruit, for anyone willing to think their way out of the low-trust box.

2. You Can’t Get Trust with Cheese.  The rats-and-cheese model of behavioral change through incentives doesn’t work with trust, because incentives are personal and trust is relational. Unless you can make incentives team-based and long term, they fail. Even then, they can and will be gamed by very smart rats. See next item.

3. Regulation Is a Vicious Circle. Wall Street pays much more than regulators, and many regulators go to work in the industry they regulate. Regulators have small budgets. But even if that were untrue, you can’t regulate morality. In fact, the more you make “ethics” the target of regulatory efforts, the less it becomes about morality and the more it becomes just compliance.

4. The Needed Values are Clear. They’ve been obvious for some time. They are:

  1. a focus on the client first for the sake of the client
  2. a belief in collaboration
  3. a focus on relationships, not transactions
  4. a default to transparency

These are key to trust. They are clearly in short supply on Wall Street.

So, how to increase ethics on Wall Street? Two answers:

One is, cheer on Brad Katsuyama’s noble capitalist market experiment in honesty, transparency and customer focus.

The other? Instead of Occupy Wall Street, how about – Outsource Wall Street! To Canada!

Within months, I suspect, we’d see lower transaction costs, less risk of flash crashes, higher liquidity, higher legitimate volume, and a reduction in the total size of the industry with no loss of value added.

All it takes is the willingness to operate based on values other than dog-eat-dog.

 

Trust Hero: Brad Katsuyama, on CBS 60 Minutes

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Illustration: Truth and LieMichael Lewis’s new book Flash Boys goes on sale at Amazon this morning, March 31. The headline, as he put it in Sunday’s exquisitely timed CBS 60 Minutes – “The stock market is rigged.”  And it’s rigged in favor of high-frequency traders.

Complaints about high frequency trading are not new. What is new, to nearly all of us, is the story of an unlikely trust hero that Lewis profiles, and the amazing response to HFT that he is developing.

Brad Katsuyama, a Canadian employee of Royal Bank of Canada, ran the New York trading desk for RBC. He noticed that the trading action was as if someone was constantly front-running him, causing him higher prices to fill orders, and thus higher costs to his customers. He soon found the problem was endemic in the industry.

He teamed up with an Irish fiber networks expert. The two of them and their team figured out how it all worked. Firms like Spread Networks had figured out how to lay enough fiber cable to allow just milliseconds of advantage – enough to notice an order from someone like RBC, then quickly get in front of that order at other exchanges, and buy-then-sell the same stock before the victim’s trade, running on slower networks, could get filled.

It is, as Lewis says, “legalized front-running.” And it was clearly worth billions.

Trust Motives

Now comes the trust part. Katsuyama and his team figured out how to beat the front-runners by spreading their orders to all arrive at the same time at different exchanges.  But he wasn’t done yet. He wanted to change the rigged market. Why? “Because it just didn’t feel right. Customers of pension funds and retirement funds are getting bait-and-switched every day.”

Katsuyama quit his million-plus job and set out to found a new exchange. What motivated him – the chance to earn multiple millions more, in good capitalist fashion? No. In his words, “It felt like a sense of obligation; we’ve found a problem affecting millions of people, blindly losing money they don’t even know they’re entitled to.”

They founded IEX, a competitive exchange; using 60 kilometers of cable to disadvantage the HFTs, they beat them at their own game. The exchange is off to a good start, though with lots of powerful enemies.

Selling Trust 

Katsuyama himself is a bit giddy. “To think that trust itself is actually a differentiator in a services business – it’s kind of a crazy idea.”

Of course, it is anything but crazy. As Michael Lewis says, “When someone walks in the door who is actually trustworthy, he has enormous power. And this is about trying to restore trust to the financial markets.”

Exactly. As anyone who’s been reading this blog for years knows, trust sells. Trust scales. Trust creates value. Trust is an enormous competitive advantage.

If you can drag untrustworthy practices out into the sunlight, customers overwhelmingly prefer trustworthy practices. Key investors like David Einhorn agree; Einhorn figures IEX is a winner.

More power to Katsuyama and to IEX. It’s good to have someone you can trust on Wall Street. I would not bet against him.

Why Some Men Don’t Trust Women In The Workplace

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(And Why Some Women Don’t Trust Men, And How to Break The Vicious Cycle)

Why Some Men Don't Trust Women in the Workplace 23-Feb-2014Nobody, it seems, wants to talk about one of the most important dynamics of the modern workplace: Men quite often don’t trust women, and women with comparable frequency don’t trust men. The breakdown of trust is especially common when the male is a manager and the female is his subordinate. Burdened by stereotypes, myths and other hidden assumptions about female employees, he doesn’t trust her to get the job done. Having repeatedly been marginalized by her male bosses and male co-workers, she adapts in ways that exacerbate the breakdown in trust.

This reciprocal breakdown in trust can torpedo not just one, but two careers. Still, all is not lost. There are ways to sever the dual ring of vicious cycles and reestablish trust between men and women in the workplace.

Cycle 1: Why men don’t trust women

Let’s start with the stereotypes about women as employees. Women always put family and children above their jobs. If there’s a ballet lesson or if school gets out early, the callback to a key client will have to wait until tomorrow. Women always get pregnant and take maternity leave just when a new office is opening. Women take Family Medical Leave to care for an elderly parent with a stroke or a teenage child with mononucleosis just when a new computer operating system is being installed. Women are always on the verge of quitting when child-care responsibilities become overwhelming, and they will no doubt quit right before a crucial deadline.

We move on to another unstated but critical myth. Women are emotional and not analytical. Women will make workplace decisions based on feelings rather than facts. Women worry more about their co-workers’ comfort level than about getting the work done.

Then there’s the hidden assumption that a female employee is not really committed to the business. In the minds of many male managers, this assumption is reinforced every time a woman requests flexible work accommodations. Working from home means less “face time” with her male manager, and when a woman is out of sight, she must not really be working for the company.

Sometimes a male manager assumes that his female subordinate has gotten her job solely because the company had to comply with affirmative action guidelines. He feels that the pressure from higher-ups to diversity the workforce has lowered the quality of new hires. He looks at the top echelons of the company, sees very few female executives, and concludes that investing in a junior woman is a waste of his time. Better to not trust her to do important assignments. Just let her wither on the vine.

Cycle 2: How women reinforce the mistrust

Let’s start with the natural inclination to trust those who are like us. A male manager may perceive that his female subordinate is just different. She has had different experiences. Perhaps she didn’t play on the high school basketball team. Maybe she could care less about the lack of good relievers in the bullpen or the dubious wisdom of a first-round draft pick. Having experienced harassment or bullying in the workplace, a woman may have her guard up. She may be disinclined to engage in backslapping, deprecating humor. When it’s time to remind a co-worker about an upcoming meeting, she may not tell him to “get your butt over here pronto.”

Let’s move on to the false inferences that male managers draw from women’s inferior salaries. Many women find it difficult to demand higher starting salaries and to negotiate raises. As a result, they end up doing the same work as their male peers for less. Managers are privy to salary information. A male manager may interpret a woman’s lower salary not as evidence of inequity, but as a sign of weakness, as an indicator that she does not really have a long-range commitment to the company.

A male manager may find himself excluding his female subordinate from informal get-togethers where co-workers can bond with each other. He may believe that women don’t want to go out for drinks, take advantage of free tickets to the season opener, or attend industry conferences. He may worry that close familiarity will be interpreted as sex discrimination or sexual harassment. When his female subordinate is excluded from these bonding events, he doesn’t get to know her. Feeling excluded, she lacks the motivation to go the extra mile for the company, and the gap in trust just widens.

Finally – and perhaps most important – you cannot trust an employee if you feel her behavior is unpredictable. A male manager may find it difficult to give critical assignments to a female employee because he’s not sure how she will interact with her co-workers or with customers. He’s not sure how she will handle a crisis. He doesn’t feel confident that she will put in the extra hours when the deadline approaches.

This sense of unpredictability is exacerbated by what I’ll call the toggling strategy that many women are forced to adopt. Having received conflicting signals about how to act in the workplace, she toggles back and forth between the traditional male mode – decisive, aggressive, demanding, career-focused – and the more sex-neutral collegial mode – collaborative, inclusive, less dictatorial. This toggling frustrates her manager, who perceives her as alternately antagonistic and ineffective.

Trust has become a key competency

There’s no need to dwell here on the adverse consequences of this lack of trust for the woman’s career. Nor does it require an in-depth analysis to see the enormous waste of talent and corporate resources. The critical point is that trusting co-workers of the opposite sex has become a key competency for assuming a position of leadership. A breakdown in trust can sidetrack a man’s career as well as a woman’s.

The business world has become increasingly diverse and globalized. A male manager who cannot look beyond the stereotypes of his female employees may be similarly unable to develop trusting relationships with peers and clients of different races, ethnic groups, religions and nationalities. The same goes for a female who has developed self-protective behaviors that exacerbate the breach in trust. Failure to trust will translate into failure to advance to the top ranks of the organization.

Breaking the cycles of mistrust

So how can a male manager resist his stereotypes about women in the workplace? And how can a woman steer clear of the safety strategies that exacerbate the mistrust?

First, he needs to accept as fact that women as a group are no less committed to their careers than men. Take it at face value that a woman who gets an education, shows up every day for work, completes her assignments and is receptive to feedback is, in fact, serious about her job. Understand that everyone has some family responsibilities and that a good manager can incorporate absences into his planning, whether they’re due to pregnancy, tennis elbow or a heart attack. If a woman is taking advantage of some form of flexible work arrangement, focus on the work performed, and not on how often you see her face.

He needs to persist in his efforts to include his female subordinates in the entire range of work-related activities. That means water-cooler conversations, after-work drinks, sports events and industry-wide meetings. She needs to break the habit of refusing any such overtures, to entertain the possibility of loyalty and respect for him as a manager. She needs to recognize that through his efforts at inclusiveness, she will get to know about the business. She will get to know him and his peers. She will trust him.

He needs to avoid pat assumptions about how she will react to others, as these assumptions rarely hold up in practice. He needs to make a genuine effort to get to know her, to understand why she acts the way she does, and she needs to allow him to understand her. She needs to send him the message that he can be confident about her reactions to future deadlines, mishaps and crises at work.

She needs to tell him straightaway when an assignment is unclear or when his expectations about her performance are fuzzy. He needs to tell her if she is acting in ways that make him uncomfortable.

He needs to realize that most women suffer from lack of adequate feedback, and not from poor motivation or bad intentions. He needs to tell her when she’s erred, to suggest mentors and coaches, and to model behavior. When there is a problem, he needs to no longer be reluctant to address it. And she needs to accept his advice. Don’t write her off. And welcome him into the bargain.

 

 

 

Building the Trust-based Organization, Part II

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The Elephant In The OrganizationIn my last post, Building the Trust-based Organization Part I, I suggested that approaches to trust at the organizational level fell into several categories. Like the parable of the blind men and the elephant, all captured some part of the puzzle, but none grasped the entirety of the issue.  The five categories I listed were:

1. Trust as communication
2. Trust as reputation
3. Trust as recipe
4. Trust as rule-making
5. Trust as shared value.

I suggested a holistic approach would have a Point of View, a Diagnosis, and a Prescription.  Here is my attempt to offer such an approach.

Organizational Trust: A Point of View

Trust relationships are asynchronous – one party, the trustor, is the one who does the trusting, and who takes the risks. The other party, the trustee, is the one whom we speak of as being trustworthy. “Trust” is the result of a successful interaction between these two actors.

Trust is largely an interpersonal phenomenon. Trustworthiness is mostly personal, though we do speak of ‘trustworthy’ companies as having a track record or being reliable. Trusting, however, is a completely human action, not a corporate one.

Risk is necessary to trust: if risk is completely mitigated, we are left only with probability.

It follows that the most powerful meaning of “organizational trust” is not an organization that trusts or is trusted, but an organization that encourages personal trust relationships:

A trust-based organization is an organization which fosters and promotes the establishment of trust-based relationships between various stakeholders – employees, management, shareholders, customers, suppliers, and society.

Organizational Trust: Diagnosis

What is needed to create a trust-based organization? Since ‘trust’ is such a broad concept, it’s clear that themes like communications, regulations, and customer relationships will have a role. But to avoid a mere laundry list, what’s needed is some kind of primus inter pares relationship; or perhaps some necessary vs. sufficient distinctions.

My nomination is simple: an agreed-upon system of Virtues and Values. Virtues are personal, and represent the qualities sought out in employees and managers. Values are organizational, and reflect basic rules of relationship that ought to govern all relationships within the organization.

Some typical trust-based virtues include: candor, transparency, other-orientation, integrity, reliability, emotional intelligence, empathy.

I have suggested elsewhere Four Trust-based Organizational Values. They are expressed below in terms of customer relationships just to be specific, but they apply equally to relationships with suppliers, fellow-employees, and so forth.

  1. Lead with customer focus – for the sake of the customer. Begin interactions with other-focus rather than self-focus.
  2. Collaboration rather than self-orientation. Assume that the customer is a partner, not in opposition to us.  We are all, always, on the same side of the table.
  3. Live in the medium-to-long term, not the short term; interact with customers in relationship, not in transactional mode. Assume that all customers will be customers in perpetuity, with long memories.
  4. Use transparency as the default mode. Unless illegal or hurtful to others, share all information with customers as a general principle.

Advocates for Values.  I am not alone in citing Values as lying at the heart of the matter. McKinsey’s Marvin Bower put values at the center of his view of business, and McKinsey for many years was run from his mold. As Harvard Business School Dean McArthur said of Bower, “What made him a pioneer was that he took basic values into the business world.”

In 1953, Bower said, “…we don’t have rules, we have values…”

In 1974, he wrote, “One of the highest achievements in leadership is the ability to shape values in a way that builds successful institutions. At its most practical level, the benefit of a managed value system is that it guides the actions of all our people at all levels and in every part of our widespread empire.”

Bower’s biographer noted that Bower believed that “while financial considerations cannot be ignored, business goals must not be financial; if they are, the business will fail to serve its customers and ultimately enjoy less profit.”

The alumni of McKinsey – some, anyway – learned well. Harvey Golub said, “[values are] a powerful way to build a business…it worked for McKinsey and it worked for IDS and for American Express.”

IBM’s Lou Gerstner said: ‘“I believe that I learned from [Marvin] the importance of articulating a set of principles that drive people’s behavior and actions.”

[Note: McKinsey itself had some noticeable hiccups post-Bower. In my view, this is not an indictment of values-based management, but a sad example of how it requires constant values-vigilance].

The Case for Values.  The use of values as the basis for management is well-suited to the subject of trust, and this advantage shows up in numerous ways.

  • Values scale, in a way that performance management systems never can do.
  • Values are about relationships, in a way that incentives never can be; this makes them highly suitable to the subject matter of trust.
  • Values are infinitely teachable, in a way that value propositions or communications programs alone cannot aspire to.
  • Values are among the most un-copyable of competitive advantages.

Organizational Trust: Prescription

Managing a values-based organization will center around keeping the values vibrant. This is pointedly not done mainly through compensation and reward systems, corporate communications plans, or reputation management programs. Instead, it is done through the ways in which human beings have always influenced other human beings in relationship.  To name a few:

  1. Leading by example: trustworthy leaders show the way to their followers by their actions, not just their words
  2. Risk-taking: trusting others encourages them to be trustworthy, and, in turn, to themselves trust others
  3. Discussion: principles undiscussed are principles that die on the vine. Discussion, not one-to-many communication, is key to trust
  4. Ubiquitous articulation: trust principles should underpin many corporate decisions and actions; trust-creating leaders seize the opportunity for teaching points in every such case
  5. Recognition: Public praise for values well-lived is intrinsically motivating
  6. Confrontation: Trust-building leaders do not hesitate to overrule business decisions if they violate values, and to do so publicly in ways that teach lessons. Values, not value, are the ultimate arbiter of all actions.

To sum up: it’s a simple concept. Trust in a corporate setting is achieved by building trust-based organizations. Trust-based organizations are built to consciously increase the levels of trusting and of trustworthiness in all organizational relationships. The best approach to creating such an organization is values-based management and leadership. This is different from most approaches to management and leadership in vogue today.

The quotes about Marvin Bower were taken from:
Edersheim, Elizabeth Haas (2007-12-10). McKinsey’s Marvin Bower: Vision, Leadership, and the Creation of Management Consulting. Wiley.

Building the Trust-based Organization

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The Elephant of TrustDo your eyes glaze over at that title? Mine do. I always click on such titles, but am usually disappointed when I get what feels like low-content or high fluff-quotient material. So I set out to tighten up the perspective.

Tentative conclusions: sometimes the issue really is vague, fluffy, fog-sculpting content. More often, however, it’s more a situation of the blind men and the elephant: all describe a key component of the answer, but none have a holistic perspective.

The Parts of the Elephant

This is not an exhaustive taxonomy, but a great number of pieces about creating trust in organizations do fall into these categories. Here are the equivalents of the blind men seeking to describe the elephant of trust.

Trust as Communication. “Communications is fundamental to earning trust,” says Jodi MacPherson of Mercer in Ivey Business Journal. “At the heart of building trust is the process of communication.”

This approach gets one thing very right; trust is a relationship, not a static set of virtues or characteristics. Hence the connection between parties is key, and communication is the basic way parties relate to each other.

However, the communication approach begs one huge question – the content being communicated.

Trust as Reputation. The Edelman PR firm’s annual Trust Barometer has been a major communications success.  A sample statement:

Corporate reputation and trust are a company’s most important assets, and must be handled carefully…Beyond safeguarding a reputation, the 2012 Edelman Trust Barometer findings reveal that businesses acquire a greater license to operate as they expand their mission and create more meaningful relationships…By identifying a company’s assets and weaknesses in the realm of trust, we help corporations uncover, define, exemplify and amplify their authentic identity in ways that resonate with stakeholders and inspire support of their business mission.

This approach has one big risk: by equating trust and reputation, the emphasis naturally falls more on managing the perception of the trustor, and less on managing the trustworthiness of the trustee.  It is also inherently corporate, and therefore impersonal.

Trust as Recipe.  There are probably more approaches that fall into this camp than any other.  It includes lists of (typically 4 – 6) actions, principles, insights, definitions, concepts which, if considered or managed or invented or followed or preached about, result in greater trust in an organization and between that organization and its stakeholders.

A good example is Ken Blanchard Company’s The Critical Link to a High-Involvement, High-Energy Workplace Begins with a Common Language.  They offer  four trust-busters (one of which is lack of communication), five trust-builders, and three rules to building leadership transparency.

Trust as Rules-Making. A Harvard Law blogpost titled Rebuilding Trust: the Corporate Governance Opportunity, Ira Milstein points out the critical roles that can be played by boards and shareholders in increasing trust.

A similar point is made from an Asian perspective, in Corporate Governance: Trust that Lasts, author Leonardo J. Matignas says “Corporate governance is not premised on a lack of trust. It simply ensures that trust is accompanied by practices and principles that will further strengthen it.”

While these views may appear slightly narrow, they’re part of a broader governance category that says corporate trust lies in better rule-making. If the game is out of control, we need to clarify the rules, tweak the goalposts, empower the referees, and not be afraid to make changes to the environment in which business operates legitimately as business.

The strength of this view lies in its linkage of business to society – the implicit statement that there is no Natural Law that says business has any right to stand alone outside a broader social context.

Trust as Shared Value. In Michael Porter and Mark Kramer’s notable 2010 HBR article Creating Shared Value, Porter auto-performs a conceptual sex-change operation on his previous work. The author of Competitive Strategy and the Five Forces affecting competitive success boldly charts out a world in which companies take the lead in formulating multilaterally beneficial, long-term projects for the greater betterment of all stakeholders. The lions and the lambs can get along after all, it seems.

Porter and Kramer deserve mention here because they have pinpointed something few others do – an unflinching claim that economic performance at a macro level is consistent with firms behaving at a micro-level in longer timeframes and in more multi-stakeholder collaborative manners. (Incidentally, this view reclaims Adam Smith from the clutches of the Milton Friedmans and Ayn Rands who suggest competition is purely about survival of the fittest, and restores to him a sense of Smith’s broader views as reflected in his Theory of Moral Sentiments).

They are not entirely alone. The Arthur Paige Society a few years ago published The Dynamics of Public Trust in Business, which similarly stated:

…trust creation is really an exercise in mutual value creation among parties who are unequal with respect to power, resources, and knowledge. We believe that a core condition for building public trust is the creation of approaches that create real value for all interested parties—businesses and public alike.

Of all the views, Trust-as-Shared-Value is the one most breathtaking in scope. The issue facing it is one of execution. There is a bit of a “then a miracle happens” quality, perhaps inevitable given the scope of envisioned change.

Seeing the Elephant Whole

All the five generic approaches above get something important right – but none of them constitute a full answer to “How do we make trust-based companies?”

So what would constitute a good answer?  It must have three parts: a Point of View, a Diagnosis, and a Prescription.

Crudely speaking, in the list above, Porter/Kramer’s Shared Value is a point of view lacking a prescription. Trust as Rule-Making is a diagnosis without prescriptions or a point of view, and Trust as Recipe is pretty much prescriptive in nature.

In Part II of this post, I offer my suggestion for how to best answer the question across all three dimensions.

It Depends on What the Meaning of the Word ‘Responsible’ Is

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Photo By: Bob JagendorfIf that title reminds you of a Bill Clintonism, that’s no accident.

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie today joined Mr. Clinton as a recipient of the PTSA (Politicians’ Tortured Syntax Award). But in Christie’s case, we’re not being educated about existential issues – rather, it’s about what we mean when we say we’re responsible.

Christie declared himself “responsible” for some bad things that happened under his watch –  all the while making very clear that he himself never did and never would condone such things, never knew or approved of them, etc.

In fact, he was shocked–shocked! – to find that such things had been going on.

When Christie says “I’m responsible,” he is relying on our being confused about what that  word means (and like all good deceivers, he probably suffers from the same confusion himself).

What he is trying to sound like is more like what we mean by “accountability.”

Meaning: the buck stops here, at the end of the day they all report to me, it happened on my watch.  All these are ways of saying the Guy in Charge must suffer the occasional betrayal from his underlings, but he himself is noble, and grievously wounded by these terrible doings from the disloyal dogs in whom he had misplaced his trust.

Other examples? We heard the same thing from Rupert Murdoch. Ronald Reagan was famed for saying ‘mistakes were made.’ Jamie Dimon recently lamented the London Whale who cost JPMorgan so many billions.  And we’re often suckers for that line, because we confuse the meaning with something else.

The Real Meaning of Responsibility

The other meaning of responsibility is not “accountability,” but direct, causal linkage. For example:

 

Q.  Who was responsible for hiring these lying and conniving aides?
A. Chris Christie

Q. Who was responsible for delegating considerable authority to these lying and conniving aides?
A. Chris Christie

Q. Who was responsible for believing and backing these lying and conniving aides when they were questioned?
A. Chris Christie

Q. Who was responsible for creating a culture which tolerated or encouraged such venal behavior?
A. Chris Christie

This is the meaning of the word “responsibility” that CEOs and politicians need to be held to. Not whether they were personally culpable, but whether they created the reality in which these things happened. Notwithstanding the smoke they want to throw in our eyes about personal guilt.

Peter O’Toole died recently. One of his memorable roles was as Henry II in the film Becket. When held to high standards by the troublesome Archbishop Thomas a Becket, Henry cried out to a group of his knights, “Will no one rid me of this troublesome monk?” The men got the hint. Becket was killed – and Henry had what diplomats delicately refer to as “plausible deniability.”

Christie is trying to claim plausible deniability on the grounds that he didn’t do the deed.  He shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it, anymore than Richard Nixon was.

Nixon famously said,  “I am not a crook.”  That was not the point for Nixon, not the point for Henry, not the point for Murdoch, or Dimon, and not the point for Christie. The point is – who designed the organization in which these things “happened” to happen.

That is “responsibility.” It’s a rare commodity these days.

A Better New Year’s Resolution

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Happy New Year! New Year card with folded colored paperI wrote a good blog post at this time seven years ago, and haven’t improved on it yet. Here it is again.

Happy New Year.

—————–

My unscientific sampling says many people make New Years resolutions, but few follow through. Net result—unhappiness.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

You could, of course, just try harder, stiffen your resolve, etc. But you’ve been there, tried that.

You could also ditch the whole idea and just stop making resolutions. Avoid goal-failure by eliminating goal-setting. Effective, but at the cost of giving up on aspirations.

I heard another idea: replace the New Year’s Resolution List with a New Year’s Gratitude List. Here’s why it makes sense.

First, most resolutions are about self-improvement—this year I resolve to: quit smoking, lose weight, cut the gossip, drink less, exercise more, and so on.

All those resolutions are rooted in a dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs—or with oneself.

In other words: resolutions often have a component of dissatisfaction with self. For many, it isn’t just dissatisfaction—it’s self-hatred. And the stronger the loathing of self, the stronger the resolutions—and the more they hurt when they go unfulfilled. It can be a very vicious circle.

Second, happy people do better. This has some verification in science, and it’s a common point of view in religion and psychology—and in common sense.

People who are slightly optimistic do better in life. People who are happy are more attractive to other people. In a very real sense, you empower what you fear—and attract what you put out.

Ergo, replace resolutions with gratitude. The best way to improve oneself is paradoxical—start by being grateful for what you already have. That turns your aspirations from negative (fixing a bad situation) to positive (making a fine situation even better).

Gratitude forces our attention outwards, to others—a common recommendation of almost all spiritual programs.

Finally, gratitude calms us. We worry less. We don’t obsess. We attract others by our calm, which makes our lives connected and meaningful. And before long, we tend to smoke less, drink less, exercise more, gossip less, and so on. Which of course is what we thought we wanted in the first place.

But the real truth is—it wasn’t the resolutions we wanted in the first place. It was the peace that comes with gratitude. We mistook cause for effect.

Go for an attitude of gratitude. The rest are positive side-effects.

 

Readers’ Choice: Top 10 Posts from TrustMatters for 2013

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The votes are in! Your votes, that is – the votes you made with your ‘feet.’

From Sales and Leadership to Neuroscience and Shakespeare, we covered a wide range this year. But your interest is what ultimately determines what’s of most importance.

So, that’s why we’re taking a moment to share with you the top 10 most-popular TrustMatters blogposts from this year – as decided by you. If you can discern the (an?) underlying pattern in this list, we’d love to hear it.

Without further ado, here are the Readers’ Choices for 2013:

1. The New Leadership is Horizontal, Not Vertical

2. 8 Ways to Make People Believe What You Tell Them

3. Hitting a 7-Iron From The Tee Box

4. Know Yourself. Wait, What Does That Even Mean?

5. When You Can’t Get No Respect

6. Brutal Honesty Isn’t

7. What Sales Winners Do Differently: Q&A with Mike Schultz

8. Why Experts Are Bad at Sales

9. Why We Don’t Trust Companies Part I

10. How Neuroscience Over-reaches in Business

Interview with Trust Expert Eric Uslaner

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ericuslanerEric Uslaner is perhaps the world’s leading authority on social trust. He was recently much in the news, as he is every year, with the annual publication of the General Social Survey on trust.  Here are some headlines from our talk this past fall.

Charlie Green: Thanks very much for speaking with me. We last talked back in early 2010. Now, most of my readers are accustomed to talking about trust in the sense of trustworthiness, like can I trust banks, or how can I get people to see me as trustworthy. Your approach is different. Let’s clarify that first.

Eric Uslaner: That’s right, it is different. You’re talking about people’s perceptions of other people’s trustworthiness. There are two parts to that: part one is it’s a specific person or institution about which you’re having the opinion: the other is that we view trustworthiness as the active characteristic.

I focus differently. I focus not on the perceived trustworthiness of specific individuals (or companies), but on the propensity of individuals to trust strangers, or people in general. It’s more about a worldview than about direct experience. And the GSS, which has included these key trust questions since the  late 60s, consistently asks that kind of question: “Do people generally mean well,” that kind of thing.

CG: What are the differences in looking at trust that way, as opposed to trust in banking, or JPMorgan Chase, or international banking?

EU: There are two big differences, and they’re interrelated. First, social trust – what I’m talking – about  changes far more slowly, over a longer period of time. Nowadays a third of Americans say that people generally can be trusted; 20 years ago that number was half. And in many ways it’s not because of a decline in trustworthiness – crime is down, for example.  But what’s changed is people’s propensity to trust strangers.

The second difference is that social trust, as I’m talking about it, is what we need to drive political societies. You’re not going to get problem-solving done in a pluralistic society by sticking with your own kind. Generalized social trust is what drives our institutions – not whether trust in banking is up or down last month.  And on that measure, we’re in deep yogurt.

CG: And how does social trust play out against these other forms of trust?

EU:  Most of the time trust in institutions (except for the military) tends to go up or down somewhat together. Much of it’s driven by the economy; when things are good, we generally trust each other. An example: Trust in government rose under Reagan, because the economy was doing well.  But trust in people declined over that same time, largely because inequality drove people apart.

CG: So, institutional trust has a shorter time-span than generalized trust?

EU: Yes. Institutional trust is the response to Ed Koch’s old question, “How’m I doing?” You look at the economics of the moment; that’s why presidents always try to have the economy’s wind at their backs going into an election, because people’s political trust is short-term.

But social trust, that’s more a matter of long-term questions. Will life be better for my children?  That doesn’t depend on the Fed, or the stock market.

CG: Say more about that? Has social trust got to do with empathy?

EU: Yes, but it’s much more than just empathy.  You have to have a willingness to interact with people, and to see the world from different perspectives. It’s not that you have to change your mind, it’s just that you’ve got to concede that someone else’s reality may have as much validity as your own.  And in the US, the Congress has come to reflect the same sort of denial of legitimacy that has characterized the Arab-Israeli divide for so long – a denial that the other side has any claim to decency.

CG: Let’s get basic. Is social trust valuable? Do we want it? Do we care?

EU:  Absolutely. It’s what allows social cohesion, national identity, a sense of purpose and mission in a society. You only solve social problems if you feel you own them. Once people start thinking more in terms of their narrow group and less about those “others,” it’s an easy flip from “they’re different” to “they’re wrong.”

It’s not hard to trust my wife, the people in my church, or those I meet at my grocery store or my school. The question is, can I trust those who are different from me, and whose values I may not share?  And by the way, the less those people shop at my supermarket or go to my kids’ schools, the less likely I am to trust them.

CG: I was going to ask – what drives this kind of social trust? Or is that too vague a question?

EU: It’s not too vague, but the answer requires two levels.   First, people who have a high propensity toward social trust are a) optimistic about the future, and b) feel they have control over their lives. And people who have a low propensity toward social trust are the reverse – they believe the world is getting worse, and that it’s largely beyond their control (if not controlled by those “others”).

CG: So – optimism and empowerment.

EU: Yes – and now for the punch line, the second order drivers of those two.  A propensity toward social trust is influenced by a) education, and b) economic inequality.  The less educated people are, and the greater the income dispersion in society, the lower will be the social trust.

CG: That makes some sense.

EU: It makes more than sense. Denmark is one of the highest-trust countries in the world, and also has extremely high education rates, and very low rates of economic inequality. Equally important, economic mobility is far greater in Scandinavia (and even in the UK, these days), than it is in the States.

CG: Why do education and income disparity drive social trust?

EU: Education teaches people that their worldview is not the only worldview. It’s the touchstone of tolerance and appreciation. And economic disparity – at least past some tipping point, indicated by the ability of groups to migrate upward economically – is an indicator of hope, or of hopelessness. Also, the further apart we are economically, the less it appears to all that our fates are linked.

CG: So where do we stand these days in the US, and in other countries?

EU: We have increasingly solidified patterns of racial and economic segregation of housing. Social mobility is now behind that of dozens of other countries.

In the US, the flight of the black middle class has left the double-whammy of economic and racial segregation, with no powerful social institutions to get people out. Segregated communities are dysfunctional across a plethora of indicators – both groups tend to identify more with in-groups, and less with the society at large.

CG: What can business do?

EU: Get involved in the larger society. It’s unfortunate that most business rhetoric has tended to work against any sustained effort to fight inequality. Historically, go look at what Coca Cola did in Atlanta, and what Henry Ford did in Detroit. Coke knew that good people wouldn’t want to move to a segregated city, so they became active in integration of schools. Henry Ford famously paid his people enough to be able to buy cars. If Ford had not been such a rabid anti-Semite, he might have had more influence on public policy on inequality.

The more companies pursue their own interest, the more difficult it is for them to pursue bonds with their own community, which drives inequality even further. The prevailing ideology of business these days is at odds with the creation of a society that nurtures business; it’s very short-sighted thinking.

In the US, I’m reminded of an old CBC comedy skit, The Royal Air Farce, who said, “Things are going to get a whole lot worse before they get bad.”

CG: And on that light note, we’ll have to leave it.  Please come back and chat some more, Ric, this has been extremely enlightening.

A Tale of Two Cities: Trust and the iPad

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photo by Sean MacEnteeSuppose you’re a high school administrator in a metropolitan area. Your district has the opportunity to use a number of iPads at subsidized rates to help in the students’ education.

Would you:

a. Be sure to load up the tablets with educational software and put in some restrictions on social media sites,
or,
b. Leave the devices pretty much the way they are out of the box, with no particular restrictions?

This happened. One district was in Los Angeles; the other, Burlington Mass, a suburb of Boston.  The question du jour is:

Which school district went with which approach?

So Much for Laid-back West Coasters

Westchester High, part of the Los Angeles Unified School District, went with option a.  Let’s just call it, oh, the “We don’t trust you kids” option.

Burlington (in the heart of Boston’s famed Rt 128 tech corridor) did the loosey-goosey thing.

So much for east coast / west coast stereotypes.

But what’s interesting was the result.

The Fruits of Low Trust

Students in LA took only a few days to hack the filtering software, thus getting into the verboten territories of Facebook and Pandora. The school district:

treated the security breach as a crisis. At Westchester High and two other schools where students managed to liberate their iPads, it ordered that all tablets be returned. In a confidential memo intercepted by the Los Angeles Times, LAUSD Police Chief Steven Zipperman warned of a larger student hackathon and suggested the district was moving too quickly. “I’m guessing this is just a sample of what will likely occur on other campuses once this hits Twitter, YouTube, or other social media sites explaining to our students how to breach or compromise the security of these devices,” wrote Zipperman. “I want to prevent a runaway train scenario when we may have the ability to put a hold on the rollout.

There are plenty of folks who see the LA experience as a fiasco, serving the interests only of tablet producers like Apple.

The Payoff of High Trust

But then there was Burlington. Other than installing a porn filter, the district consciously chose to avoid the “lockdown” approach, instead offering “digital literacy” classes where kids could develop a web presence to impress college admissions officers.

The students already intuitively knew how to use the equipment. They took to it like ducks to water, rapidly outpacing the faculty, who then dug in to catch up with their students.

The teachers now go to a student-run Genius Bar.  The English department created an online vocabulary textbook that saved budgeted funds. And the kids behaved themselves.

The program was enough of a success that they’re expanding it to middle school students.

The Moral of the Story

Too often when we speak of trust, we speak only of static components – moral values, credentials, observing rules.  But an enormous amount of trust is governed by the reciprocating, interactive rules of human behavior.

Specifically – one of the best ways to make someone trustworthy is to start by trusting them in the first place. People hugely live up – or down – to what is expected of them. So much of the cure for low trust lies not in yet-more regulations and audits, but in more risk-taking that requires trust!

Are you listening, banks? HR departments? Employment lawyers? Teachers? The cure to low trust is frequently – more trust.