Why We Don’t Trust Companies Part IV: The Solution

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Solving The PuzzleMy last three posts – here, and here, and here – were about why we don’t trust companies. To review the bidding, I’ve said it’s because:

  • Trust is predominantly personal in nature – a fact most companies don’t recognize
  • Corporate missions, motives and mindsets are all tainted by zero-sum, competitive ideologies
  • Trust requires risk, while companies abhor risk.

Stripped down – companies see trust as impersonal, ideologically suspect, and too risky.

Now, if I am right about that, then we would want to see solutions in the business world that recognize the personal nature of trust, incorporate trust-enhancing ideologies, and embrace risk-taking to enhance trust.

Surprise surprise – that’s not what we see.

The dialogue about corporate trust is consistently mis-framed. It is not companies that trust, or are trusted. It is the people in the companies who trust, or are trusted. The challenge is not to make companies trust or be trustworthy – it is to create corporate environments in which people can trust and be trusted.

In the trust game, the company is an agent, an enabler – not a primary actor.

The Usual Recommendations to Increase Corporate Trust

I spend a lot of time reading reports on how trust in business can be improved. Here are a few examples;

Believe me, there are hundreds more.

These are all reasonably good pieces of work (there are certainly worse). But even from these top-drawer sources, the top-line recommendations are bloodless, abstract, and cold – because they’re focused at the corporate level. (Curiously, the right answers in all four of these cases are in fact contained in the reports – they’re just buried deep.)

Typical topline recommendations look like these (taken from the sources above):

  • Increase adherence to ethical codes and standards
  • Create a set of values that define and clarify what your enterprise and its people are at root, and work to ensure that these values are adhered to consistently across your enterprise.
  • A well-defined, repeatable roadmap for the conversation…more transparency about fees and costs
  • Communicate frequently and honestly on the state of the business.

Again – there’s nothing wrong in these recommendations. But taken alone, they are sleep-inducing; they sound like Charlie Brown’s teacher’s Mwah, Mwah, Mwah.

Where is the personal? The belief system? The risk-taking? Where’s the people?

The Right Answer for Increasing Corporate Trust

Again, not that there’s anything wrong with the suggestions above, but they don’t get to the heart of the matter. Here are some recommendations that do.

1. Trust is personal – so lead by example.

Role model it. Everyone, not just the top leaders.  And to be sure what “it” is, identify hundreds of situations and the appropriate responses for each (not to memorize, but to ensure understanding). Talk about them – endlessly.  Get coaching. Do brainstorming sessions. Talk about what you’re doing with employees, and with customers. Identify key vocabulary terms you’ll use, and use them. Publicly praise and private counsel appropriate personal examples of trust-based interactions.

The way to get a trust-based company is not to fix the company – it’s to fix the people and the environment they live in so that the people can trust and be trusted in all their affairs.

2. Articulate and preach the trust ideology.

Reject zero-sum thinking. Think long-term relationships, not short-term transactions. Make transparency a default state in all conversations (except where illegal or harmful). Emphasize win-win solutions with customers, employees, and other stakeholders. Believe that trust relationships are more profitable over the medium and long-term, that they are complementary not opposed to corporate success.

3. Teach Social Risk-taking

People can’t learn to trust if they have no degrees of freedom to do so. People are more likely to be trustworthy if they are trusted. Human relationships are formed by the constant reciprocal taking of small risks; the result is long term risk mitigation.

There are personal relationship skills that drive trust. They can be taught, and the teaching of them gets to the heart of a trust-enhancing organization.

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The route to a high-trust organization is through its people. That route starts not with corporate policies per se, but with human interactions.

 

 

Why We Don’t Trust Companies, Part III – Risk

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Take the RiskThis is the third in a four-part series about why we don’t trust companies. The final post will offer solutions.

In the first and second posts, I said trust in companies is so low because companies don’t understand the personal nature of trust, and because they hold various beliefs that seem at odds with trust.  Call those drivers “ignorance” and “ideology.”

[Note: ignorance and ideology are not the reasons commonly cited for low corporate trust. The usual suspects include lack of regulation, conflict of interest, perverse incentives, lax enforcement, and greed].

There is one more big issue that affects our distrust of companies – the issue of risk. Risk is fundamental to both corporations and to human trust, but their views on the subject are diametrically opposed.

Trust absolutely requires risk, while corporations abhor it. The conflict between these two views explains quite a bit.

Risk and Trust

There simply is no trust without risk, almost by definition. To trust another is to willfully put oneself in harm’s way. The act of trusting lies somewhere between one extreme of cold calculation of odds, and the other extreme of blind faith.

Contrary to what Ronald Reagan was fond of saying, “trust but verify” is an oxymoron. If you have to verify, it isn’t trust; and the act of verification tends to negate trust.

Risk plays a critical role between the two parties of a trust relationship. The trustor is the one taking the risk, the one who puts himself in harm’s way. The trustee is the one who is granted the power by virtue of the trustor’s risk. How he responds is critical to the establishment of trust.

This dance of risk-taking is the essence of human relationships. I extend my hand, and you either extend yours back to me, or turn on your heel and spurn me. Romantic relationships are established by an elaborate ritual of progressive risk-taking and positive responses. So it is with trust.

Trust is a bilateral, asymmetric relationship – risk is the medium of exchange. A trusting relationship can mitigate larger risks, but it almost always begins with a small risk taken.

Risk and Companies

By contrast, corporations abhor risk. In a zero-sum, Hobbesian, sustainable-competitive-advantage world (see part II of this series), to put oneself in harm’s way of another is simply irrational, if not suicidal.

[Note: I’m not talking here about risk in financial markets – alpha and beta, hedging, risk appetite – those are design features of a product being sold.]

This negative attitude toward risk is pervasive. It’s at the root of business insurance contracts, legal reviews, communications approval processes, and a great many policies and procedures.

I recently heard of someone in the reputation management business who said they’d gotten inquiries from people and from companies alike in times of crisis. But, when they heard that his recommendations included an apology, all the corporate inquiries dropped off. Only individuals were willing to consider reputation repair that included  apologies.

The reason is clear: to apologize looks like an admission of guilt. An admission of guilt opens up a corporation to civil lawsuits. Almost all companies will view such a situation in strictly legal terms, and the “right” answer is the one that limits risks. Ergo, no apology.

This dichotomy makes sense because humans relate to apologies – to apologize is a form of risk-taking that can help restore trust. Corporations, not being human (see Part I), see apologizing in strictly legal, non-human terms. For people, apologies are about character and reputation; for corporations, they’re about threats and survival.

We as humans want truth-telling and accountability in order to trust. But companies tend to resist telling the truth or taking accountability if it puts them legally at risk.

When you have different perspectives on truth and accountability, you have a very wide divide. One more reason we don’t trust companies – they don’t usually behave by the “rules” of trust, which is (see Part I) predominantly human.

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The final part in this series will move from the negative to the positive, and offer solutions.

 

 

 

 

 

How Neuroscience Over-reaches in Business

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The Science of BusinessEvery age has its fads and fashions. Some of them hold up over time – competitive strategy, business process re-engineering, quality circles.  Applying neuroscience to business, I suggest, will not be one of them.

In Mark Twain’s classic Huckleberry Finn, there is a passage where Huck tries to explain to Jim that French people speak a different language. Jim would no more be able to understand a Frenchman, says Huck, than he could understand a dog, or a cow, or a cat – because they all speak different languages.

Jim’s retort is that a Frenchman is not a dog, cow or cat, but a man – and that therefore by all rights he should talk like a man, meaning English. As is true in Huckleberry Finn at a meta-level, it’s the truth of the innocents (this time voiced by Jim) that is the deeper truth. The difference between human languages is trivially and categorically distinct from the differences between the species.

Neuroscience in business is something like that. Neuroscientists seem to think that their research is revealing previously hidden secrets of leadership, influence, motivation, and decision-making. But all too often, all they’re doing is translating into French.

Overstating the Case

There are plenty of examples, frequently from highly distinguished, educated, and highly regarded people, of claims for neuroscience in business. For example:

The statements all follow a general pattern. First, a discussion about the structure of the brain, or the neurochemistry of a particular event type. Second, a correlation of those structures or chemistries with some management phenomenon.  And third, a conclusion about what can and should be done in management, based on the preceding two insights.

The Proof is In the Pudding

Here are actual examples from the authors themselves about the power of neuro-thinking to help management.

Here is Daniel Goleman distilling the neuroscience advice on how to help others change bad habits:

  1. Empathize before giving advice
  2. Be a good listener
  3. Offer a caring gesture
  4. Give them your full attention

Here are Crawford’s four lessons from neuroscience on how to improve innovation:

  1. Eat and sleep well, and don’t stress
  2. Expose yourself to new ideas
  3. Make it safe for people to share ideas
  4. Create playful environments.

Here is John Ryan on four neuroscience-derived “tactics to boost our performance and model success for our colleagues.”

  1. Be positive
  2. Give detailed, positive feedback
  3. Stay healthy and in good physical shape
  4. Seek challenge, but not to the point of stress

Here is Pillay on ways that brain science can “enhance understanding within the executive environment”

  1. Re-packaging old ideas in neuroscience terms can make them more acceptable
  2. Using the language of brain science can seem less personally threatening
  3. Brain science uncovers myths (he lists six myths, none of which need brain science to debunk)
  4. Giving further insights and evidence (e.g. “visualizing isn’t just New Agey,” and “the brain can change.”)
  5. Providing a system for targeted interventions
  6. Developing coaching protocols and tools.

Non Sequiturs and Blinding Flashes of the Obvious

I don’t know about you, but I find these conclusions to be either completely unrelated to the neuroscience itself (Pillay’s claim that people like scientific language, therefore the language helps people understand better), or numbingly old hat.

Do we really need the language of neuroscience to be convinced that we should be positive, healthy, empathetic and good listeners? Where are the now-decisively vanquished proponents of negative, unhealthy self-absorbed managers?

The neuro-fans do have one point, however. An MIT study evaluated the effect of logically irrelevant neuro-babble on listeners to a debate. They found:

Subjects in all three groups judged good explanations as more satisfying than bad ones. But subjects in the two nonexpert groups additionally judged that explanations with logically irrelevant neuroscience information were more satisfying than explanations without. The neuroscience information had a particularly striking effect on nonexperts’ judgments of bad explanations, masking otherwise salient problems in these explanations.

In other words – it all just sounds so much prettier when they say it in French.

[Note: I do believe there are valuable applications of neuroscience, particularly in designing targeted medical solutions. I just don’t see them much in evidence in business. And yet, it’s a mainstream fad. Ah, Barnum…]

 

The Twin Sins of Trust

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You’ve probably heard “sins of commission, and sins of omission.” It is usually linked to Christian theology, particularly some of the New Testament gospels and Paul’s epistles , but it also has been used by writers like Moliere, and in discussions of Aristotle.

Anyway, it’s a simple enough idea to be broadly useful. A “sin of commission” is doing the wrong thing. A “sin of omission” is a failure to do the right thing.

Sins of commission tend to be more obvious by their nature – but sins of omission can be catastrophic. Think of a lifeguard failing to respond to someone who “sort of” looks like they are in distress. Think of the “good German” concept (failure to act against the Nazis).

But especially, think of the two concepts as they relate to trust.

The Drivers of Commission and Omission

The nature of trust is that it involves risk. If risk is not present, then we may be talking about probabilities, but we’re not talking about trust. Someone must take a risk for trust to arise.

The risk almost always consists in potentially committing a sin of commission. I answer a question you have; I observe something about you or your business; I tell you what I think you need to do, or I hold forth on some topic. In all those cases – I could be wrong. That is the risk.

Taking that risk opens me to a sin of commission. I might be wrong. You might be offended. I might not get the sale. Everyone might suddenly realize that I’m the blundering fool I’ve desperately been trying to keep hidden from people. And so, we do nothing, because it feels less risky. And in this we are wrong.

But by doing nothing, we open ourselves to the possibility of sins of omission. If I take no pain, I get no gain. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Wayne Gretzky said, “You’ll never miss a shot you never take.”

And the results are measured in lost opportunity. Love. Repeat business. Deeper, trust-based relationships.

The Calculus of Commission and Omission

Here’s the thing. People systematically over-estimate near-term results and underestimate long-term results; and they over-estimate the pain of commission vs. the pain of omission. We fear losing something more than we fear not gaining something. One bird in the hand is worth two birds  in the bush (i.e. 50% more valuable).

The result?  A systemic bias to absorb sins of omission, rather than suffer sins of commission. Applied to trust, that means the most likely reason for low trust is the failure to take a risk in the first place. And I see this every day, all around me.

I see it in technical and services professionals. They fear being wrong more than they fear appearing silent, and so they say nothing, or they blather on about the unimportant. They are so fearful of emotional connection that they attribute that same fear to the customers, telling themselves that customers really don’t want relationships, that they must remain “professional.” In this, they are painfully, systematically wrong.

I see it in relationships. People are afraid of being vulnerable or hurt, so they shut down, or they pre-emptively attack others.

I see it especially in sales. The fear of doing something wrong leads salespeople to do what they think is low-risk. That usually means sticking with credentials, filling in silences, talking about themselves, or “How ’bout them Bulls.” God forbid they have to answer a question to which they don’t know the answer, or engage the customer emotionally.

Institutional Trust

And then there is structural trust. The more we try to improve institutional trust by guarding against sins of commission, the more opportunity costs of trust we create. When we pass legislation to prevent abuses of trust, when we insist on more insurance clauses in our contracts, and when we build more steps into our business processes, we are chipping away at trust by failing to allow any risk at all. This is why business so easily confuses compliance with trust.

The moral of the story is this: if you strip out all risk, you end up with no trust. And that is not a happy world to live in.

Boston Trust

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Last week, trust was destroyed. Then it was rebuilt.

At least, that’s the party line in all the media and the social buzz channels. But it’s not the whole story. The whole story is, unfortunately, not so good.

Particularized Trust and Generalized Trust

Dr. Eric Uslaner, arguably the world’s leading academic on the subject of trust, makes a key distinction between two types of trust – particularized and general. Particularized trust is experience-based trust in specific things – particular people, or institutions.

Particularized trust is what happens when we experience people to be similar to us. When a runner stopped to aid a race spectator, for example, or when the citizens of Watertown recognized that the police were on their side. This kind of trust is what we hear talked about most in the press. It’s what we mean when we say “trust takes time.” (Which it doesn’t, by the way; but that’s another story).

The other kind of trust – what Uslaner calls generalized trust, or moralistic trust – is the really powerful kind. Uslaner explains:

[Moralistic] trust doesn’t depend upon evidence or experience. It is the belief that we can trust people whom we don’t know and who may be different from ourselves. This is the sort of trust that helps societies solve key problems. It is more based upon our belief that we ought to trust people—the Golden Rule—than our experiences with people we know well and who may look and think like ourselves.

This kind of trust changes only glacially from experience. It is not “destroyed in an instant,” as particularized trust can be destroyed by an instance of betrayal. Generalized trust is gotten from our parents, even our grandparents; it’s handed down with mother’s milk.

When someone says, “You’re way too trusting, you know,” that’s the kind of generalized trust you’re not likely to change just because you get burned once.

The Powers of Trust

For all the print space given particularized trust (e.g. trust in banking is down, trust in government is down, Bostonians are wicked trustworthy), high levels of particularized trust are by no means all positive. The worse experiences people have, the more they are tempted to withdraw into tribal groups, where they experience particularized trust – trust in those who are like them, in shared opposition to those who are not. “We” are not going to let “them” stop us.  Boston Strong is a tribal cry in this sense.

But it is generalized trust that makes for powerful societies, efficient economies, flourishing nations – not the tribal bonds of particularized trust. Uslaner:

…particularized trust as a substitute for generalized trust is a negative for a group.  If a group limits its trust, it results in closed minds, cultures, and economies.

And now we can see the sad trade-off in Boston. The story wasn’t Trust Lost and then Trust Regained. It was a slight, but real, loss in moralistic, generalized trust – with a swap-out for particularized trust. Net net, it’s a loss for society.

For all the tribal celebrations and tales of individual courage and grace, the impact of a dent on generalized trust is negative. It will most likely result in pressure against immigration, not in favor of it. It will most likely result in closed borders, not open; more surveillance, not less; more suspicion, not less; and more enmity of “us” against “them.”

Building Generalized Trust

In Uslaner’s latest book – Segregation and Mistrust – he enlists massive amounts of data to show that diversity doesn’t help or hurt generalized trust – it is integration that helps it, and segregation that hurts it. And our society is becoming more, not less, segregated – in housing, in race, in income, in social groups.

The two largest drivers for greater generalized trust, he notes, are high levels of education and low levels of income inequality. It’s not looking good for either these days. Instead, we’re seeing higher levels of the wrong kind of trust – the tribal bonding of like people, trusting each other in a joint mission to make sure that the “others” don’t win.

Uslaner points out that high-generalized trusting people broadly believe two things: that the world is generally getting better, and that they have control over their own lives.

By contrast, low-generalized trusting people believe the world is going to hell in a handbasket, and it’s “those others” who are conspiring to keep “us” down. It’s a society dominated by that kind of thinking that, in extremis, produces nihilistic, desperate bombers.

Talk of “Winning” against “Others” is not a good omen for the important kind of trust. The legacy of the Boston bombings will be more negative than positive.

 

Sales, Surgeons and Profits

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iStock_000002256780XSmallThe NYTimes recently published Salesmen in the Surgical Suite, a look at some questionable sales practices in the US surrounding a robotic surgical technology called the da Vinci Surgical System, a product of Intuitive Surgical Inc. The article cites a case of severe damage to a patient due to inadequate training of surgeons, and a variety of documented practices by Intuitive pushing the limits of proper training and supervision.

My point is not to argue the case for or against the company; that’s being done already in a case filed against them. What I do want to touch on is how we should think about issues like this. In other words – just what kind of a problem do we have here?

Profit vs. Patients?

The ultimate issue, I suggest, is the relationship between a for-profit business and the well-being of the end-user customers. Health care is an extreme case, because of the direct link between the two; but in a sense, this is the same issue we face in a capitalist society for any good or service. Healthcare, and surgery in particular, are extreme cases, thus useful for clarifying issues.

There are three commonly heard points of view:

1. There is an innate conflict between the interests of the profit-seeking business sector and the ultimate good of the patients; this conflict must be regulated by a third party of some sort.

2. There is no innate conflict between business and patients, except insofar as business is regulated by governmental and other third parties, who inevitably just distort the ideal workings of pure markets.

3. There is no innate conflict between business and patients, except insofar as business misreads its own long-term self interest by being addicted to short-term fixes, leading to regulation – a self-inflicted shooting in the foot.

The first two arguments are endlessly hashed over, with much heat and little light, in all the various venues of the day: from Congress to HuffPost to talk radio to coffee shops. (I suspect this debate is largely a US debate, as most other developed economies have tilted toward the first viewpoint, far away from the second). I’m not going to change anyone’s mind about the relative merits of one and two.

But number three is interesting: it suggests that the business-society conflict is unnecessary, and that the solution lies largely within the hands of business itself. All that right vs. left, redneck vs. socialist shouting is nothing more than noise.

Is this a utopian, pollyana-ish view? Or is it very real?

The Best Interests of Business

We can reframe the issue as simply, “Is there or is there not a long-term fit between the interests of business and consumers?” Karl Marx answered in the negative, and claimed that the tension would ultimately result in revolution. I suggest that any right-thinking capitalist must answer in the affirmative – there must be a commonality of interest, else the doctrine of capitalism is of little use or interest.

But if that’s the case in the long run – why then isn’t it in the short run? Why do we see salespeople play with endangering people’s lives in order to get the order in before the end of the quarter? Why do companies fight for less regulation, commit economically foolish acts in order to smooth quarterly earnings, and prefer the net present monetized value of almost anything, rather than the longer-term asset that comes from brand, history and culture?

We live in a very imperfect business world, I suggest. We do not do a good job of assessing economic good, or even of assessing business value. We rely on definitions of value which are narrow, solely financial in nature, and short-term. The tyranny of the discount rate leads us to forego thinking about the next generation – it’s just un-economic to worry about something 40 years out, there’s not enough present value in it to justify it.  The Chinese have a history of looking at hundred-year timeframes; the US struggles to get past quarterly, and three years might as well be a lifetime.

The poverty of our financial calculus can be described several ways. Economists would say we do not take into account externalities, so we delude ourselves about the costs of degrading the environment. Social scientists describe it as resulting in a poverty of the spirit (a tone we hear echoed by those who preach ‘the final days of the empire’).

This poverty of calculus is supported by impoverished thinking. Adam Smith was brilliant; the caricatures of him that came down through Ayn Rand and the Chamber of Commerce retain nothing of his focus on the good of society, much less his work on the moral sentiments. Even business theory is impoverished – NPS and Five Forces just don’t have the sweep that we saw from Peter Drucker or even Sun Tsu.

What I’m suggesting is that business needs to radically re-think itself, across the board, into a long-term partnership with the rest of society. The commercial instinct of mankind ought to be a driver of value and wealth creation for all of society, and not hostage to an ongoing battle between haves and have-nots. Whether we need more or less government, more or less regulation, should not be the issue.  The issue should be how can business and society line up on the same team?

We really should be able to do better.

Insecure Egomaniacs

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Stern Woman BWIn April 2007, the New Yorker published an article by John Calapinto called The Interpreter. It describes Dan Everett, a linguistic researcher who lived for many years with a remote Amazonian tribe in Brazil, the Parahã.

The Parahã consider their language to be vastly superior to all others, and show no interest in learning other languages. In fact, as far as they’re concerned, nearly anything that isn’t part of their culture is completely un-interesting – planes, movies, radio. They are entirely self-absorbed, in a very profound and fundamental way.

Meanwhile, back in the “civilized” world, the field of linguistics is dominated by the theory of Noam Chomsky, which I won’t attempt to describe except to say it posits a universal characteristic of human propensity to form language. In other words, it says all languages must have this one thing (recursion) in common.

Well, surprise, surprise. The Parahã language, according to Everett, appears to be a counter-example. All attempts at demonstrating recursion fail. Chomsky would appear to be wrong.

But the Chomsky-ites are undeterred. Something must be wrong – wrong with the data, wrong with the researchers, wrong with the methodology. Because something can’t be wrong with the theory.

And so the linguistic theorists are just like the Parahã they study: convinced of the utter un-interesting-ness of the world around them – and blissfully ignorant of the irony.

Self-Centricity

Linguistics is hardly the only example of this self-centricity. We are literally born with it; our world starts off as hardly larger than our mother’s arms. Our view of astronomy was earth-centric until very recently in terms of human development.

To this day, maps of the world tend to be centered around, surprise surprise, the country they’re sold in. China was called the Middle Kingdom. Mutual funds in the US tend to be heavily weighted toward US stocks, while those in the UK are UK-weighted – yet each describes itself as global in view.

So, we think we’re the center of the universe. Let’s call that arrogance.

But arrogance has a helpmate, who often shows up at the same time and place.

Insecurity

We all like to be liked. The need for affiliation runs deep in our species, and not just for propagation. As far back as archaeology can inform us, we have tried to present ourselves to others in the best favorable light. Women wear makeup, men strut. So it goes.

In modern society, this reaches abstract levels. Some develop neurotic obsessions about the likelihood of their newborn offspring getting into Harvard, and nearly all of us are prey to teen-age angst – they like me, they like me not, my life is over.

Truth be told, very few of us ever achieve complete escape velocity from this insecurity. We still channel our inner teen-ager with depressing regularity. The urge to measure our insides by the metric of others’ outsides is powerful.

Insecure Egomaniacs

When self-centricity meets insecurity, we get Insecure Egomaniacs. In my experience, it’s not that some people are IE’s and some not – it’s that we all are IE’s, more or less, at different times. The struggle is to be less of an IE, more often, in more situations.

When we are in our IE phase, we reciprocate like alternating current between worrying that no one notices us, and that everyone is looking at us. We think ‘dance like no one’s watching,’ but we aspire to dance so well that everyone watches. We want to be at the center of the crowd, but we sit in the back row, on the side.

It’s as hard to trust an IE as it is for an IE to trust. Both arrogance and insecurity are a form of alienation, cutting us off from another, and from others. In our IE modes, we see risk everywhere, and can’t bear the thought of intimacy or vulnerability – it would either deflate our arrogance, or frighten our insecurity.  And so we rotate, iterate, prevaricate.

We are not doomed by our IE predilections, not by any means. But that’s another story.

 

Using Valuable Content to Build Trust Through the Sales Process

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Valuable ContentPlease welcome guest-blogger Sonja Jefferson to Trust Matters today. She’s founder of Valuable Content consulting firm, and author of the Valuable Content Marketing book. I have high regard for what she does, and think you’ll enjoy this.

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I’d like to make a distinction. ‘Content’ is the words on the page you are reading. It’s the copy on your website, the blog you posted last night, the videos, images and tweets that you share. When we’re talking about content we just mean words, knowledge and information.

What lifts a piece of content above all the noise is the value it has to the person reading it. The term we use is ‘valuable content’. Valuable content is supercharged content – words, knowledge and information shaped for your particular audience. It is content with a bigger purpose, useful information created for a niche; quality collateral that really hits the mark.

Valuable content is meaningful content and it will help you build trust at every step of the buying process. Here is how I’ve seen it make a difference to consultants and professional advisors along the long road to a sale.

Valuable Content For Every Step of the Sale

Growing awareness: Online or off, the right content will help you be found. Search engines reward valuable content. Just like your prospects, the Google algorithm is getting better and better at recognizing and blocking spam. But if you regularly share useful, relevant content in your blog articles and social media updates you’ll build your reputation and network, and rank as a helpful expert in your niche.

“I was struggling with an issue, and didn’t feel I had the whole picture. I searched on the web and found a really useful article by X. Funnily enough someone in my network had mentioned them favorably recently too.”

Generating interest: They’ve found your website, do they find something relevant and useful when they get there? Most websites and marketing communications are nothing more than self-oriented propaganda. We follow the 80/20 rule of thumb: aim for 80% valuable content and no more than 20% promotion. Pack your website full of engaging content, just for them. The key is to focus on the client and their issues: how-to articles and valuable guides are far more engaging than a brochure.

“That article really got me thinking. It made me curious about the people behind it. I checked out their website and found a veritable library of information on the subject – more articles, some interesting slide sets, a great video.”

Proving your expertise and motivating them to buy: Buyers are more likely to want to work with thought leaders and experts in a given field, and your published content helps you earn that title and builds trust in what you can do. When you’re up against a competitor, valuable content gives you an edge. When clients see your passion and expertise shining through, you gain an added level of credibility.

“The quality of their content, as well as their case studies and testimonials, gave me confidence in their ability and set them apart from their competitors.”

To convert all this good will into action is often a matter of good timing. Not everyone will be ready to buy straight away, so motivate them to keep in contact with you – connecting on social media and a simple email newsletter once a month will keep you front of mind.

Making it real and deepening the connection: Turning the spark of interest into a burning desire to meet means engaging prospects on a deeper level. Online tools like the Trusted Advisor Trust Quotient Assessment are a great way of helping potential clients experience the way you could help them; valuable in their own right. Webinars are another way to let potential clients see you in action. Hearing your voice, seeing you answer questions in real time make the benefits of your services come alive. Put the customer and his challenges at the centre of your world, and show them clearly not just how you help someone like them, but how your insights and experience could directly benefit them, for real.

“Every contact with them is valuable to me. I can see they develop good relationships with clients. They are a good fit for my world.”

Help Your Clients Along The Sales Journey

Marketing with content is more than just a lead generation activity. It’s an invaluable tool right through the process from first touch to long-term relationship.  Help your buyers along their sales journey with valuable content. Provide genuinely useful information at each stage of process – from ‘just looking’ to ‘just about to buy, big time’. Use it wisely and people will get to know, like, and trust you, and remember you when the time comes to buy.

[You’re in the right place if you want an example of best practice. Just look around you on the Trusted Advisor website.  You’ll find content here for every step of the sale, from tweets to articles, to e-books, online tools, webinars, his newsletter and of course Charlie’s books.]

 

The Math of Low Trust

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Trust in business has declined in recent years. One reason why can be demonstrated with a bit of math.

Assume two streams of income, with a net present value calculation for each. (I’ll use a 10% discount rate to simplify). Income stream A has a big payment in year 2 and then pays slightly more per year – but only for 5 years, after which it all ends.

Income stream B is steady and solid, giving less income per year – but lasting 8 years.

NPV Chart

Which income stream do you choose? If you’re a dutiful MBA or financial manager, then in theory you choose B, the one with the higher NPV. In fact, in the real world, stream A is chosen far more often – for two reasons.

Reason 1. What if the example were ended after 7 years, instead of 8 years? In that case, the NPV of Income Stream B would drop to $44.72 – so presumably you’d choose Stream A, which is  unchanged at $46.17.

Timeframe makes a difference. If the average time you spend in a job is less than 8 years, and you are a rational self-maximizing business person, you’ll choose a far shorter timeframe in which to maximize your performance, because that’s what you can control. And these days, it’s more like 2 years than 8.

Reason 2. In the above example, the unspoken assumption is that it is, in fact, a solitary single example. But assume there are thousands of investment opportunities out there, with very similar payoff characteristics. In which case the smart thing would be to take Income Stream A – and then sell it after two years.  Then go find a new Income Stream A in which to invest your profits, and do it all over again. That way you’ll vastly out-perform either strategy, in virtually any time frame.

Or – would you?

Trust and Net Present Value

What’s this got to do with trust? Think back to Walter Mischel’s famed marshmallow study on deferred gratification. We do not trust people who have no self-will, who cannot defer their desire for instant gratification, because they are not in charge of their own desires. But that’s just one marshmallow incident; the rationale doesn’t go beyond Reason 1 above. What happens when one’s choices can be made over and over again?

That pattern – endlessly taking short-term gratification and jumping off onto a new high-then-low curve – is a very familiar one. It is what characterizes alcoholism, addiction, and it explains why junk food sells. “Just one more drink; one more cigarette; one more Frito. I’ll quit tomorrow, honest.”  But there’s always another drink at hand, and cigarettes and Fritos are ubiquitous.

The connection to business? Easy. Think about the obsession with quarterly earnings. Think about Wall Street’s “IBGYBG” mantra (I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone – do the deal). Think sales quotas, weekly P&Ls, constantly refreshing online metrics for performance. A myriad of new front-end loaded opportunities for instant gratification. Running a business this way perverts strategy in favor of a series of opportunistic NPV calculations.

Business Since 1970 – One Major Trend

Biggest trend of the last 40 years?  An obsession with markets. We have pursued, especially in finance, the grail of frictionless markets, believing that the Invisible Hand will save us by converting our individual selfishness into collective good.

It’s a crock. What markets have also done is encourage NPV calculations everywhere, all the time, and everything is monetized so we can compare them. There’s always another front-end loaded curve to buy into. Buy it and flip it. Invent a new business and IPO it before it goes profitable. IBGYBG. Markets – abetted by modularization and outsourcing and communications – have enabled massive short-termism in business.

The game works until the game doesn’t work. It works if you assume your grandchildren’s world will not suffer by your focus on short-term NPV enhancement. It works if you assume that a culture of instant monetization will beat Chinese strategies from a civilization accustomed to thinking in centuries.  It works if you assume that long-term good is achieved by means of constant short-term optimization.  But it isn’t.

Trust and Short-Termism

There’s  a reason that one the Four Trust Principles is “Focus on the medium-to-long term, not the short term; develop relationships, not transactions.” It’s because trust is born from long-term commitments; the confidence that the other party is after something besides their own instant gratification. Short-termism is perhaps the most perniciously anti-trust business phenomenon of our times. We have been poisoning our corporate cultures through a relentless focus on markets, monetization, analytics and processes.

Those are not the basis of trust. A commitment to long-term principles and relationships is the basis of trust.

Trust, Scale, and the Corporation

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Erecting Trust in a BusinessI always have trouble answering a question I’m often asked: What company does a great job on trust?  Because the answer is some combination of, “it depends on the definition of trust,” and “hardly any.” Let me unpack that.

Trustworthiness and the Corporation

Mitt Romney’s metaphysics notwithstanding, corporations are not people, apart from a few legal rights. Corporations don’t smile, feel guilty, bleed, or feel emotions. That means: it makes some sense to say “company X is trustworthy,” but it makes little sense to say “company X trusts.”

Trustworthiness attributes that a company can exhibit include reliability and transparency. But to say that a company trusts is simply to make statements about company policies put in place by people. So from one perspective, the connection between corporations and trust is largely a subset of trustworthiness.

Of course, from another perspective it’s meaningful nonetheless to talk about corporations in terms of trust.  That perspective is best articulated by Trust Across America, which uses the acronym FACTS to identify five metrics associated with trustworthiness. Those are: Financial stability and strength , Accounting conservatism, Corporate integrity, Transparency, and Sustainability. Most people would generally agree that those attributes are associated with what we call trust, and I think TAA have done a sensible job of defining and weighting those components.

And yet, that still leaves all that human-y stuff – the bleeding, feeling, risk-taking, emotional parts of trust. The parts that corporations can’t do.

Personal Trust in the Corporation

Corporations cannot trust, but they have enormous effects on whether or not its people trust, and are trustworthy. The biggest influence on trustworthiness and the propensity to trust is not metrics, or compensation systems, or even policies. It is values and culture.  Do the values and culture celebrate honesty, integrity, long-term perspectives, and other-orientation? Or do they stress short-term performance, micro-metrics, “being tough,” and meeting the numbers?

The question of values and culture brings me back to that opening question: What company does a great job on trust?

When I answer “hardly any,” what I’m saying is I don’t see any large corporations that are driven by trust-related values, or support trust-friendly cultures.  I have seen some good examples of smaller-scale organizations that are highly trust-based – a unit at Microsoft, Bangor Savings Bank, and Pediatric Services of America, for example But these are relatively small organizations. Where are the Citibanks, General Motors and Oracles in the pantheon of trust-friendly organizations?  Is the problem that trust can’t scale?

Can Trust Scale?

Trust very much can scale. In fact, values-driven organizations scale very well, especially in fast-moving and complex industries, where standardized processes are too complex to keep up with reality.  The issue is not being values-driven – the issue is which values will drive. Goldman Sachs is a values-driven organization; so is Apple. It’s just that the values being valued don’t include trust in the top list.

Now here I’ll get speculative. I think this is because the dominant values in Western business in the last 50 years have been largely anti-trust. The values we have espoused have included competition, the Darwinian-revised version of Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand, caveat emptor, management-by-metrics, management-by-process, and the reduction of all issues to an NPV calculation.

These are serious values, and they are all either anti-trust or trust-neutral (even though, as Trust Across America is demonstrating, trust is associated with higher profitability). And they are extremely dominant values. You don’t get to be a Big Corporation without drinking deeply of these belief systems, taught as they are in MBA programs and the popular business press.

A significant part of building trust in business is going to come not by revising policies and governance, and not by better regulation, but by re-orienting a corporation around core trust values. I see no reason to believe that trust values can’t scale as well as the other values; we’re just awaiting leaders with the vision and courage to lead the way.