Part 2: Why Aren’t There High Trust Strategies in a Low Trust Industry?

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The Financial Trust PuzzleIn my last post, I asked the question: If financial services are such a low-trust industry (on average), then why isn’t someone pursuing the obvious differentiation strategy of forming a high-trust organization?

The Reasons Why

I offered five possible reasons, and commenters added two more.  They were:

  1. Wait – some companies really are high-trust.
  2. The nature of the business is highly competitive – you can’t be high trust and stay in business.
  3. The industry is full of untrustworthy, greedy, anti-consumer people.
  4. The industry is so over-regulated that trust never has a chance to get traction.
  5. The media have a bias that will sink most attempts at high-trust organizations.
  6. Greedy shareholders force companies to be untrustworthy.
  7. The industry simply does not understand the nature of trust

Here’s my take on the issue. Please weigh in with your comments, below.

1. Some really are high trust. I’ve seen many parts of organizations – business units of 100 people or so – who absolutely do run high-trust businesses. But I’ve seen very few  who have pulled it off at the corporate level (one I know of first-hand is Bangor Savings Bank). I’m sure there are others, but I’m equally sure they’re the exception, not the rule.

There’s a reason the industry is low-trust – most financial companies simply are not trusted. The data are what they are and they’re not wrong.

2. The industry is so competitive that you can’t afford to be trustworthy. I’m totally not buying this. The financial industry may appear to be “competitive,” but it is also loaded with side deals, barriers to competition, and generally anti-competitive practices. Furthermore, some extraordinarily high-trust salespeople and business units, e.g. in wealth management, are that way precisely because they are high trust. Economics 101: competitive industries are marked by low profits, not high.  The financial industry is very – very – high profit.

3. The industry is full of untrustworthy people. I’m with reader Ronald on this one – the big majority of people I know in the financial industry are not untrustworthy, selfish, dishonorable people. Sure there are Madoffs, but there are in other industries too.  The problem is that good people can get enmeshed in bad endeavors. A whole lot of unethical corporate behavior isn’t due to lax moral standards, it’s due to habits, incentives, and organizational pressure.

4. The industry is over-regulated. There is more than a grain of truth here. If you are constantly investigated and given lie detector tests, eventually you’re very likely to decide that someone’s stealing and lying, and maybe you should try and get your piece of the pie. Conflating ethical behavior with legal behavior, or check-boxes with values, is death to ethics. We can have too much regulation – at the cost of moral behavior.

5. The media done it. Is there a systematic bias against financial industries on the part of media, mainstream or otherwise? I think you can make a case that a great number of media outlets are finely tuned to seek wrongdoing from the financial sector.  But not enough of a case. If Big Finance is so powerful as to control congress, evade prosecution, and continue to collect massive bonuses – then why wouldn’t they have the power to better control their own branding? I can’t disprove it, but let’s just say I’m skeptical of conspiracy theories.

6. Greedy shareholders are to blame. There’s a lot of truth here too. The emphasis on quarterly earnings, and particularly the massive bonuses given to fund managers based on short-term performance all drive up the emphasis on profit.  (Oddly, the short-term emphasis actually reduces the profit which would be available by pursuing long-term trust-based strategies). But this explanation is as valid for high tech as it is for finance, and the tech people constantly score better trust ratings.  I’m not convinced.

And the Oscar Goes To…

7. The industry just doesn’t understand trust. Yes, you guessed it, this is my nomination for best explanation. Here’s what I mean.

First, money may be the most emotional product imaginable. The dreams that can be conjured up by perfume are trivial next to those induced by a big MegaBucks lottery. A financial planner tells me that clients would sooner talk about their sex lives than their financial lives. Money has implications for our status, our future, our children; it’s a nearly pure-emotion product.

And yet the financial industry insists on selling money services on a non-emotional basis. Credentials and qualifications are what financial planners and wealth managers lead with. Fee-only planners insist that because they’re not commissioned they are structurally more trustworthy. Bankers are fond of touting product features. About as far as emotion goes in the financial industry is to invoke symbols like the Rock of Gibraltar, or ads featuring smiling retirees who are moonlighting from pharmaceutical spots.

What you get by promoting the Merrill Barney brand, or the Smith Lynch brand, and the credentials of their employees is weak, thin trust – trust that’s getting weaker and thinner with new media and smarter consumers. Rich trust comes from personal interactions, with individuals who aren’t afraid to get personal. Emotional products call for emotional connection in the sale. Financial people are scared to death to get personal.

Second, financial institutions tend to think that trust is mainly institutional – they can’t grasp that trust at its heart is dyadic, about two people. They worry about their professionals “stealing clients” when they leave – as if the clients were property of the institution – which amounts to devaluing the key interpersonal relationships that can develop between professionals and customers.

Third, financial institutions too often try to have it both ways: they want to appear trustworthy so that clients will trust them – but they rarely turn around and trust their customers. If someone constantly asks you to trust them, but never trusts you, then trust is rather quickly lost. Is your local bank branch empowered to make a spot decision to trust you? Unlikely. And don’t tell me no-doc mortgages were an exception – those were driven not by trust, but by greed on the part of the lenders, suborning falsehoods from customers.

Fourth, no other industry I know of forces profitability analyses to such a detailed level. Not only is the timeframe for analysis very short-term, but decisions are made based on highly quantified, narrowly defined analyses. What happens if we give people a 5-day grace period – if we lose money, forget it. What happens if we tweak the eligibility standards here – if we lose money, forget it.  To some extent, this is because the product of finance is money itself – subjecting money to financial analysis is both obvious and necessary. But it does mean there is very little emphasis put on long-term returns, or balancing offsets. Sponsoring golf tournaments is about as long-term and qualitative as it gets, and I bet every company doing it has some details specs on why it’s profitable.

Finally, as noted in point 4 above, an industry which is tightly regulated can tend to lose track of the distinction between compliance and ethics. “I am not a crook” ends up being the defense against ethical complaints, and that doesn’t do the job.

So there’s my case: I think the main reason the financial industry gets such low rankings on trust is because they simply, fundamentally, do not understand the workings of trust.

Their people are neither stupid nor venal. But the cumulative impact of putting rational over emotional needs, processes over interactions, short-term over long, regulations over ethics, is such that financial organizations simply don’t have much of a clue when it comes to implementing trust.

Too many trust initiatives end up focused on customer satisfaction methodologies, CRM systems, PR and messaging campaigns, and trumpeting credentials. Rarely do they get to the heart of trust – the personal connection between a provider and a customer.

Remember who was number 1? Nurses. Just think about the difference between finance and nursing. Our financial companies could learn a lot by studying how nurses create trust.

A High Trust Strategy in a Low Trust Industry

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A Face You Could Trust?Differentiation. It’s one of the two generic competitive strategies.

You’d think it’s a no-brainer. If everyone sells coffee in supermarkets based on price, invent Starbucks. If water is free from the faucet, invent Perrier. If fund performances are undifferentiated, invent index funds.

So, if your industry ranks near the bottom in trustworthiness – why not invent a trust-based company? Would that not be obvious?

Let’s not make it too tough, by tackling used cars or Congress, but let’s take the next-worst trust-scoring industry – financial services.

In a recent Gallup survey, of 22 professions, the most trusted was nursing – as it has been for many years. 85% of respondents rated nurses high or very high in “honesty or ethical standards.”

Financial services were represented in the survey by banking, insurance, and stockbrokers.

  • Bankers were ranked 11 out of 22, with 28% rating them high or very high. That puts bankers below psychiatrists and chiropractors.
  • Insurance people get only a 15% rating, which ranks them at number 16 out of 22 – below lawyers.
  • Stockbrokers rank 19th out of 22, with only 11% saying they are high or very high.  Well, at least they beat congress!

There is some evidence that financial planners, had they been included, would have scored better, though I doubt investment bankers, traders, mortgage bankers and credit card companies would have raised the industry’s average.  And the Edelman Trust Survey puts it even more starkly: “Financial services and banks are the least trusted industries for the third year in a row.”

Net net – by and large, if you’re in financial services, people don’t trust you, your company or your industry.

Again – wouldn’t it be a logical, obvious, in-your-face strategy to build a highly trusted company?  Sure it would.

And so, the big question – why hasn’t anyone done it?

Why Are There No High Trust Strategies in Finance?

I can think of five possible answers to this question, and the first one is to deny it.

  1. Wait – some companies really are high-trust.
  2. The nature of the business is highly competitive – you can’t be high trust and stay in business.
  3. The industry is full of untrustworthy, greedy, anti-consumer people.
  4. The industry is so over-regulated that trust never has a chance to get traction.
  5. The industry simply does not understand the nature of trust.

I’ll give my analysis in the next blogpost.

Meanwhile, what do you think?  Are those the five possible answers? Which one strikes you as right?

Would Manti Te’o Trust Lance Armstrong?

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King Kong vs. Godzilla. The immeasurable force and the immoveable object. The mountain and Muhammed. To these historic pairings, add Manti Te’o and Lance Armstrong, in the roles of trustor and trustee respectively.  (For those outside the US, Te’o is a college football player whose girlfriend tragically died – and was then revealed to be a hoax, who never even existed. You know Armstrong).

It Takes Two to Do the Trust Tango

In the game of trust, there are two players: the trustor, and the trustee.

In the flurry of press coverage this past week, Manti Te’o is cast in the role of the trustor – the person who would trust another, the one who takes the risks.  The public narrative assigned to Manti is that of someone who over-trusts, who was gullibly hoodwinked by an unscrupulous party or parties. Think victims of Bernie Madoff.

Lance Armstrong is cast in the other role in the trust game: the untrustworthy party, the one who did the hoodwinking, the one who presented himself as utterly worthy of trust – and who then let everyone down. Lance plays the Bernie Madoff role in this re-enactment.

The Balance of Trust

It is, of course, possible to be too trusting – and to be too untrustworthy. Te’o and Armstrong are poster children for overdoing it in their respective directions. But there are three things to note about these contrasts.

1. The distinction is too often overlooked. How many headlines have you seen that say,”Trust in xyz is down?” What does that really mean? Does it mean that xyz is less trustworthy? Or does it mean that people have become less trusting, thereby hurting xyz?

It’s hard to define what the solutions to trust might be if we can’t first agree on what the problem is.

2. Blame is subjective. One man’s definition of untrustworthy is another man’s definition of too trusting.  Take Bernie Madoff. While everyone agrees he was a scoundrel, some people think victims should be reimbursed in some form by society.

Others think that greedy investors, who stupidly believed what they wanted to believe despite contrary evidence, got what they deserved, and that attempts to mitigate such results amount to a nanny state.

So what should we do to prevent future Madoffs: develop tighter regulations? Or educate consumers?

3. Extreme cases demonize trust.  The moralistic lessons that the media would teach us are two-fold – one each for the trustor and the trustee.  First, that we should clamp down on the untrustworthies out there waiting to get us. And second, that we should be very wary of over-trusting.

But both of those “lessons” mitigate against trust. One imposes restrictions, the other shouts warnings. One bans cigarette advertising on TV, assault weapons, and regulates viaticals. The other instills paranoia (always lock your car, password-protect everything, screen grandma at the Duluth airport).

Learning the Wrong Lessons

Both “lessons” serve to reduce the role of trust in society.  And en masse, that is a bad thing. We need more, not less, trust.

That means we need both more trustworthiness, and more willingness to trust. The two are connected, after all: not only does trustworthiness encourage others to trust, but trusting in someone raises the odds that they will live up to those expectations.

We’d be better off raising the average level of trustworthiness than worrying about the extremely untrustworthy. We’d be better off raising the average willingness to trust than worrying about the extremely naive.

We need to be wary of drawing conclusions from the trust soap operas playing out in the public square. Be good. Expect others to be good. Live your life that way. As Gandhi (supposedly) said, “Be the change you want to see in the world.” Or words to that effect.

Don’t live a life of paranoia. Be more trustworthy than Armstrong. Trust more intelligently than Manti Te’o. But don’t dial yourself back in either dimension. Instead, up the ante.

 

A Better New Year’s Resolution

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iStock_000014342439XSmallI wrote a good blog post at this time six years ago, and haven’t improved on it yet. Here it is again.

Happy New Year.

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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.

 

Trust, Gun Control, and Neuroscience

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It may be hard to imagine, given the horrific events of Newtown Connecticut, but violence of almost all types has been declining rapidly in the US and around the world.

That’s the story in the book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, a sweeping psycho-historical view of human nature by Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker. Pinker makes the case with some compelling data, though his ideas may be even more interesting than the statistics. And, they have something to say about Newtown and about gun control.

One theme Pinker touches on is self-control. Have you heard of Walter Mischel’s marshmallow experiment with kids? Young kids grappled with the choice – to take one marshmallow now, or to get two if you can wait a bit? Pinker perfectly describes the accelerating discount rate that we apply to near-term gratification vs. long-term: how much more is a bird in the hand worth than two in the bush?

The answer is, it partly depends on how “in the hand” the bird is. Faced with a two-for-one tradeoff at two points in the distant future, we have no trouble – imagine choosing between two investments, one with a 10% payoff in a year, another with a 100% payoff in two years.

Self-Will and the Proximity of Temptation

The problem comes when that 10% payoff is right here, right now. Deciding whether you should have a grilled chicken salad or a Big Mac for lunch tomorrow is pretty easy.  But what about right now?  When you just happen to be standing in front of a Mickey D’s. And it’s lunchtime.

The closer we are to temptation, the weaker our self-will becomes when up against it.  We know not to shop for food when we’re hungry.  AA reminds alcoholics not to hang around bars. We put the candy on the upper shelf where the kids can’t get at it. “Just say no” has proven no match for making condoms available when it comes to halting teen pregnancy.

In short, moral development and ethical behaviors aren’t just a matter of self-will and integrity.  Good behavior is greatly affected by the social milieu – some of which can be designed into the environment.

Gun Control and Self-Will

We give up all kinds of rights in order to not tempt bad behavior. We post speed limits on roads, and enforce them.  We enforce guidelines about additives in food, and advertising guidelines about health. First amendment rights of free speech don’t extend to shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater.

Yet in the gun control debates, the United States is conspicuous by its refusal to recognize this simple fact of moral design – the fact that availability of guns per se is a driver of gun-based violence.

Proponents of gun control insist on framing it as an issue of self-control, pure and simple –it’s psychology, they say. But even advocates of gun control have been co-opted; they generally focus on approaches like background checks, to make sure mentally impaired people can’t acquire guns.

Screening for gun purchasers is not the problem – the problem is ubiquity, pure and simple. The marshmallows guns are lying all around, tempting the unhinged to seek immediate gratification for their fevered fantasies.

Consider: Per capita gun ownership in the US is double that of any other country – the second-highest being Yemen, far behind. We have more guns in the US than we do passenger vehicles. We have 300% more guns per capita in the US than they do in France, Germany or Austria.

The result is as predictable as it is horrific. The rate of death by assault is about 300% higher in the US than in any other OECD country.  Two-thirds of murders in the US are committed with guns. Our gun-related murder rate is second only to narco-war-afflicted Mexico.

The solution does not lie in buyer screening. The problem is that we are awash with guns in the US.

Yet the response of pro-gun forces to mass murders is always the same – to focus on the self-will of the perpetrator, or on greater defenses by potential victims. This is akin to arguing for greater investor education in the face of a Bernie Madoff, less provocative clothing in the case of rape victims, just-say-no lectures in the case of teen pregnancy.

I don’t think we’ll hear anyone arguing that 1st-graders should be armed to protect themselves. And yet, sure enough, some argue that the solution is armed teachers. Enough insanity.

It in no way reduces the moral culpability of wrong-doers for us to focus on removing the source of the temptation. Why torture a kid with marshmallows if you’re trying to teach him self-control? Why allow ourselves to be surrounded by guns if we’re serious about cutting gun violence?

If we want to create a trust-based society, rather than regress to a Hobbesian world of armed camps (and schools), we have got to recognize the critical role that society plays in establishing norms, taboos, ethics, codes of conduct, and moral behavior. What we do is greatly influenced by what’s around us.

We are not born into the world with fully-formed moral codes that can be appealed to as sufficient conditions for ethical behavior. Ethics is a social construct as much as it is innate. The gun control debate needs to move not just toward tightened purchase requirements and limitations by type of weapon, but toward significantly fewer guns, period.

Trusting: the Other Side of Trust

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A lot has been written about trust.  It’s often not clear, however, whether the subject is trustworthiness, or trusting.  If trust in banking is down, does that mean that banks are less trustworthy? Or that people are less inclined to trust?

Most of my work has been about trustworthiness (e.g. The Trusted Advisor). Other people write more overtly about trusting – a good example is the HBR article ReThinking Trust,  by Stanford Professor Rod Kramer, which focuses on the danger of trusting.

Some people write about the big subject of trust itself – the end result of the interaction between trustor and trustee.  A fine example is Francis Fukuyama’s classic Trust: the Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity.

Finally, many other sources end up talking about all three; think Covey’s Speed of Trust, or Bob Hurley’s The Decision to Trust.

The Power of Trusting

The sources above are largely academic. In the popular press, by far the most common topics are trustworthiness and the state of trust itself (trust as the result of an interaction between trustor and trustee). Throw a dart into a pile of 100 popular press articles on trust, and you’re likely to find Congress, investment bankers, and the Madoff-du-jour scandal as the subject.

This means most public policy debates focus on trustworthiness.  Most examples are negative; hence trusting is positioned as cautionary, i.e. watch out for car salesmen, lawyers, etc. The moral of the story is tut tut, another untrustworthy group, watch out.

And all this focus on negative examples of trustworthiness is having an effect on people’s inclination to trust. How could it not! And that is a terribly unfortunate thing. Because the scarce trust resource increasingly is not trustworthiness, but the willingness to trust.  We need to start focusing on the trustor, not just on the trustee.

The power of trusting is enormous. When it comes to trust, there is an answer to the chicken and egg dilemma of which comes first, the trustor or the trustee?  The answer is trustor.  Consider:

  • Until one party decides to take a risk and trust another, trust does not come into existence
  • Trusting has a profound impact on trustworthiness – think “the fastest way to make a man trustworthy is to trust him,” or “people live up or down to the expectations of them”
  • Trusting is inherently an act of optimism; a decline in trusting in the business world drives down innovation, and prevents collaboration and alliances

I’ll be writing more about this in the coming weeks. There is interesting material out there on the lessons from Prisoner’s dilemma, game theory, sociobiology, and the global decline in violence over the centuries – not to mention the backlash against competitive strategy going on in business schools.

I welcome any comments on the subject; I’m trying to do some thinking out loud here.  And I trust the readers of this blog to come up with great contributions.

Willful, Wishful Blindness: Trust and the Real Learning from the BBC Crisis

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The UK press is screaming ‘blue murder’ about the recent turn of events in the BBC:

  • ‘How to restore trust in the BBC’
  • ‘You don’t trust us – and maybe you never will’
  • ‘Trust lost, hard to regain!’

A crisis for the BBC? Certainly. But a “complete loss of trust” is a wild exaggeration. Still, there is one troubling problem at the heart of things, and the BBC must get at it: a willful and wishful discomfort with facing truth.  Vital for any organization, truth-facing is especially so for a news outfit.

The Apparent Problem

The problem in recent weeks has been in one part of the vast BBC operation – its flagship current affairs programme, ‘Newsnight’. There has been real incompetence and mismanagement, and people are rightly angry and critical. But this is an organisation that has real pedigree and a brand that is deeply respected and trusted the world over for the quality and integrity of its daily product.

Deeply held trust, reinforced over many years, simply does not disappear in one moment with one incident.  The BBC will take the steps to right the ship around ‘Newsnight’ and move on.

To recap quickly:

It turns out that one of the BBC’s leading (and well loved, but now dead) entertainers in the last quarter of the 20th century, Sir (!) Jimmy Savile, was for many years a serial and horrific abuser of many young and vulnerable people who came under his influence. It was extensive. It went on a long time. He was never stopped.

Then, ‘Newsnight’ did a poor job of investigating and communicating about the Savile case.  Compounding the error, ‘Newsnight’ wrongly accused a senior politician of serious sexual abuse in another situation. The newly appointed Director General of the BBC – George Entwhistle – resigned after just a few months in the job. Indignation, blue murder – loss of trust! – pour forth through all the media channels.

Here’s what caused the hullaballoo:

  •  Sheer incompetence – “ Newsnight’s journalism would have disgraced a student newspaper,” wrote one commenter
  • Over-bureaucratic, over-layered management, with diffuse accountability
  • Poor crisis management
  • A public primed to be cynical because of other recent scandals (not just NewsCorp)
  • A tone-deaf full year ‘pay-off’ of £495k to the resigning DG who had only been in the job for a few months
  • Hugely toxic ‘hatred’ of the BBC in some political and media circles that is easily stirred and spoiling for any fight
  • A shift in the dynamics of trust regarding media output. Restraint, rigour, caution, consideration of consequences – these apparently no longer engender trust. With the impact of the social media, trust today means sharing everything you know; transparency replaces judgment.

If that’s all there were, this would be just another scandal, albeit very public. But there is another, deeper level of concern.

Willful, Wishful Denial

What is much less certain is whether the BBC can change a culture that was willfully – perhaps wishfully? – blind to the horrible sexual abuse that took place around some of its programmes for young people. In one of the hospitals where Savile got away with all this, one interlocutor has recently said, ‘ We did wonder whether something was going wrong. But Savile simply pulled in too many funds for anyone to want to do something about it.’

This is a culture that suborns, induces, and nurtures moral blindness.

Margaret Heffernan talks about this in her recent book ‘Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril’ (Walker and Company, 2011). She says:

We are all susceptible to willful blindness, ignoring truths about ourselves, each other and the way we live, that threaten our sense of identity and security…We all succumb to the human tendency to prefer people like ourselves, to readily accept information that confirms our sense of ourselves, and discredit data that doesn’t fit our dominant ideologies. And when people are tired, busy and distracted, it’s clear that the mind falls back on stereotypes and received wisdom.

Think News Corporation, Enron, Lehman Brothers (‘The CEO, Richard Fuld, organised his life to ensure that he never encountered employees unexpectedly’), Bear Stearns (‘The CEO chose not to implement a form of risk analysis that might have revealed how much debt the bank actually carried’) and the Catholic Church (‘When first confronted with the fact of child-abusing priests, the Church chose first of all to take out insurance’).

Heffernan argues that the root cause of our willful blindness is our human instinct to obey authority. ‘Research into conformity shows that most of us would rather give a wrong answer than jeopardise belonging to a group.’

It’s the Culture, Stupid

This is where the really fundamental work lies for the BBC – reshaping a culture that is less prone to willful blindness, and more driven by its values of independence and integrity. This kind of work is not easy.  So perhaps some of Heffernan’s prescriptions might come in handy along the way:

  • Become more aware of our biases
  • Overturn corporate cultures that reward long working hours
  • Actively seek out dissenters in our circle of friends and colleagues
  • Ensure that the powerful surround themselves with independent thinkers and critical allies who have the freedom and moral courage to tell them the truth
  • Re-examine the role of obedience and compliance
  • Teach critical thinking.

This is not the stuff of MBA programs. These are not issues to be solved by technocrats, or lawyers, or business process experts. They are the simple stuff of creating an ethics-friendly culture. Simple, of course, doesn’t mean easy.  But it is – let’s not forget – still simple. Seek the right thing, talk about it, and walk the talk.

The Real Reason Productivity is Down in the US

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Zachary>Thank you for contacting Time Warner Cable. As our valuable customer, at the end of this chat you will be given the option of taking a brief survey in order to help us improve our customer support experience for you. My name is Zachary. Please give me a moment while I review your account information.

Charlie_>Hi Zachary

Zachary>Hello Charlie.

Zachary>Can you please help me your 16 digits account number?

Charlie_>xxx-xxx-xxx-xxxx

Zachary>Thank you.

Zachary>Thank you for being our valuable customer. Please give me a moment while I review your account information.

Charlie_>OK thanks

Zachary>You’re welcome.

Zachary>Thank you for being our valued customer. How may I assist you?

Charlie_>My service is out: I want to know how long to expect it to be out?

Zachary>I apologize for the inconvenience caused to you.

Zachary>Please tell me, since when are you facing this issue?

Charlie_>Since the hurricane a week ago

Zachary>I see.

Zachary>Please share some details on the inconvenience you’re facing.

Charlie_>I have internet-only service. I get no cable signal from the modem, neither when I pass it through the router, nor when I try it directly from the modem to my computer. I have tried turning them off, in different sequences, then turning them on — no change. I do not have TV service so I can’t tell you more

Zachary>Thank you for sharing this information with me. I’d be glad to assist you with this.

Zachary>I understand this could be frustrating for you.

Charlie_> My address is

Zachary>I’ll go ahead and troubleshoot this issue for you.

Zachary>Let me go ahead and transfer this chat session to our next level of support where you’ll be assisted further with this concern.

Zachary>Please stay connected while I transfer you.

Charlie_>oh groan OK

Zachary>Thank you.

Zachary>Please wait, while the problem is escalated to another analyst

Analyst has left the room. Your problem is being escalated to another analyst

Aaron>Thank you for contacting Time Warner Cable. At the end of our chat you will be given the option of taking a brief survey. My name is Aaron. Please give me a moment while I access your account.

Charlie_>OK

Aaron>Thank you for your patience, Charlie.

Aaron>How may I assist you?

Charlie_>Read the transcript above! My service seems to be out, and I’m trying to find out when it might be restored.

Charlie_>Do you need me to re-enter the information about account number, location, length of time of outage?

Aaron>Please give me a moment while I review your interaction with previous agent.

Aaron>Thank you for your patience, Charlie.

Aaron>I have reviewed your previous communication with Zachary.

Aaron>I would like to inform you that by mistake you have been transferred to a wrong department.

Charlie_>OK thanks

Charlie_>This is the third time today that happened. How can this be?

Aaron>Please stay connected as I transfer you to the concerned department.

Charlie_>OK

Aaron>Please be assured that I will connect you to the right department.

Aaron>Please wait, while the problem is escalated to another analyst

Charlie_>Hi

Margaret>Thank you for contacting Time Warner Cable’s chatroom. Please give me a moment to view your account.

Charlie_>Sure

Margaret>Hello Charlie, I could not pull up an account with the info provided. Please provide a telephone number or account number.

Charlie_>Please wait, while the problem is escalated to another analyst

Charlie_>Account Number xxx-xxx-xxx-xxxx

Charlie_>Phone xxx xxx-xxxx

Charlie_> Customer Code: zzzz

Charlie_>New York NY

Margaret>TWC account numbers in LA start with 8448

Charlie_>Goddam it I’m in New York. This is the fourth time someone has sent me to LA. I’m assuming LA doesn’t handle New York issues, right? How in the world can I get someone to answer a simple outage question about New York service?

Charlie_>Here’s what Aaron before you said: Charlie_>OK Aaron>Please be assured that I will connect you to the right department.

Margaret>no cursing – I will escalate you to the NY chat.

Charlie_>And Zachary before him?

Margaret>Please wait, while the problem is escalated to another analyst

Diosdado>Thank you for contacting Time Warner Cable Online Sales, Home of the Best Triple Play. My name is Dandy, How can I help you today?

Charlie_>Hi

Charlie_>You are the fourth person I’ve had this dialoge with; do you have access to the script?

Diosdado>Hello.

Diosdado>Yes,let me just check that.

Charlie_>My service is out. I want to know when to expect it back. Thanks

Diosdado>Thank you for the information.

Diosdado>One moment please.

Charlie_>OK

Diosdado>Thank you for waiting since you’ve been transferred to sales department i will just provide you the number that you should call.

Charlie_>WAIT!!!!!!! Every time I call a number, there is no answer

Charlie_>That’s why i went to the chat service!

Charlie_>I’ve spent the last 45 minutes on chat, you’re going to say it was all wasted, there’s no one on chat who can answer a simple service outage query?

Charlie_>I am dismayed

Diosdado>I’m sorry for that,But the thing is i will just transfer you to the technical support team so that they can answer your concern.

Charlie_>That’s what I was hoping for all along…

Diosdado>I’m sorry for the wrong transfer.

Charlie_>(s) plural, 3 of them

Charlie_>Thanks

Diosdado>Please wait, while the problem is escalated to another analyst

Charlie_>Yes, I know the drill

Charlie_>thanks

Erik Jacobs>Please wait, while the problem is escalated to another analyst

Analyst has left the room. Your problem is being escalated to another analyst

Antione>Thank you for contacting Time Warner Cable. At the end of our chat you will be given the option of taking a brief survey. My name is Antione. How may I assist you?

Charlie_>Antione, do you have access to the transcript preceding?

Charlie_>I’ve talked with Erik, Diosdado, Margaret, Zachary, Aaron and Malvin

Charlie_>I can re-enter the data; basically my service is out, and I want to know when I can expect it to return

Charlie_> Account Number xxx-xxx-xxx-xxxxCustomer Code: zzzz

Antione>Thank you for the share your concern again. Please give me a moment while I access your account and check for the information.

Charlie_>phone number xxx.xxx-xxxx

Charlie_>Thanks

Antione>Thank you for the information.

Antione>Please give me a moment while I check that for you.

Antione>xxx-xxx-xxx-xxxx

Antione>Thank you for your patience. I am checking that for you.

Charlie_>OK…

Antione>Charlie, I need to transfer this chat to the concern department. . Please remain online while I transfer the chat.

Charlie_>This is really amazing. This will be the 7th person I speak to about this. OK I’ll wait

Antione>Please wait, while the problem is escalated to another analyst

Shadd>Thank you for contacting Time Warner Cable. At the end of our chat you will be given the option of taking a brief survey. My name is Shadd. Please give me a moment while I access your account.

Charlie_>Hi Shadd

Shadd>Charlie, how are you doing today?

Charlie_>Fine except for this chat has been quite frustrating: you are number 7

Shadd>I am sorry for the inconvenience caused to you.

Charlie_>Thank you

Shadd>I understand how frustrating it is.

Shadd>You are most welcome.

Shadd>How may I assist you today?

Charlie_>Shadd, do you not have access to the transcript preceding?

Charlie_>My service is out: I want to know when to expect it back

Charlie_> Charlie_> Account Number xxx-xxx-xxx-xxxx

Shadd>I am sorry to hear that, I will definitely help you with the information.

Shadd>Please help me with the account number?

Charlie_>I just typed it in: read four lines higher

Charlie_>Here it is again: xxx-xxx-xxx-xxxx

Shadd>I am sorry for that.

Shadd>Thank you for the information.

Shadd>Charlie, I checked the details and I found that there is an outage in your area, that’s the reason of your services are out,

Shadd>I would like to inform you that, we have already made all the arrangements to make sure that it is fixed at the earliest.

Shadd>Be rest assured, our team is working on this issue.

Shadd>As I see the technician notes indicate about an Emergency maintenance carried in your area.

Shadd>We regret the inconvenience caused to you.

Charlie_>Well, thank you, that’s good to know it’s not just me, I do appreciate it. OK then, thank you. What does “emergency maintenance carried in my area” mean? I assume it means they’re expediting repairs probably, yes? Many thanks

Shadd>Yes, be rest assured the technician are currently working in the same issue.

Shadd>Most probably within 24 hours the service will be restored.

Charlie_>OK Shadd thank you.

Shadd>I will make sure that you get a prorated credit on your account as the outage is gone.

Shadd>You are most welcome.

Shadd>I will also make notes on your account regarding the same.

Charlie_>Thank you

 

Traveling Trust

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I’m in Munich for a one-day stopover en route to Bucharest. I left New York a day earlier than planned to avoid Hurricane Sandy. And I’m realizing yet again – travel has a way of doing that – what an extraordinary level of trust we all take for granted in our modern world.

Yes, the news is full of the opposite. Political campaigns spin the truth (though trust-weary Americans might want to check out the Greek scandal du jour to feel a bit better).

Doctors have a hard time trusting pharmaceutical manufacturers. Patients have a hard time trusting their doctors, and doctors have a hard time trusting their patients. Some patients trust the internet more than their doctors, often with bad results. And let’s not even start with trust in financial services.

A Trusted Trip

With all that going on, it’s easy to forget some basic things. I can freely cross national borders with some mere papers. I can trust the exchange rate when I buy Euros. I can trust the flight controllers that govern the airspace, the airline handling companies that do catering, the bus and taxi systems I encounter.

But most of all, I know I can rely deeply on the basic human decency of people I run into to help with any simple issues – even though we may not speak the same language, and we’ll never see each other again. I can trust that people will give me directions, help me with travel issues, take a moment to help sort out a problem. And I’m almost never, ever wrong in that basic level of trust.

Which motivates me, of course, to try and return the favor whenever I can. And you do the same, I know.

What’s Really Amazing

What’s really amazing is not how often trust goes wrong, but how often it goes right.  Our modern life is unbelievably complex, and yet runs remarkably well.

I don’t want to be Pollyana-ish about this. The fact that trust is so pervasive is precisely the reason we notice and feel trust violations so deeply. We are all right to be deeply offended by untrustworthy behavior; if we lose our capacity to be outraged, we have lost our ability to recover.

Lots of things can be said about lost trust, but I want to highlight one.  Trust is reciprocal. My trusting you causes you to trust me, and vice versa. An absence of trust starts with one party. The presence of trust starts with one party. The question facing all of us is, will you be the one to start?  Or will you always insist on the other party going first?

Do you insist on your vendors insuring you against all losses?  Then don’t be surprised when they don’t trust you.  Do you have all your employees sign cutting-edge non-compete clauses?  Then perhaps you can understand why they might seek ways around it.  Do you give lie detector tests to your employees? Then you might gain insight into why you have a shrinkage problem.

You can do your part as an individual too. To be trusted, be trustworthy.  And if you think others are not trustworthy as you – try trusting them first.

For starters, that’ll make your travel a lot easier.

Social Media: The End of Friends? Or the Beginning of Friendship?

/8 Comments/in /by

Remember all those curmudgeonly quips about how online “friends” were cheapening the real thing? How the Facebook generation was mistaking true friendship for the faux, virtual kind?

Can we finally lay all that to rest?

Who’s Kidding Whom?

People with a thousand LinkedIn connections, 2,000 Facebook friends and 10,000 twitter followers are perfectly aware that what they have is not the same thing as the relationship with their high school buddies.  They don’t even use “relationship” to describe it.

But neither are those connections always number-bling (though yes, some of them are).

Social media hasn’t so much redefined “friend” as it has offered a new channel to find friends.

LinkedIn and Twitter are to friends what Match.com was to dating – a vastly superior mode for doing lead-generation and processing early-stage pleasantries.  Does anyone really think singles bars were a preferable way to find romance?

The online dating services, like online genealogy services, simply made it vastly easier to broaden the range of people from whom one might choose to become better acquainted.

The Social Impact on Business

I find my business life has been remarkably impacted by social media these past few years.  A lot of the people I now call friends – real friends, in the old-fashioned meaning of the word, and rich business acquaintances – I have initially met through social media.

People like @davidabrock, @iannarino, @julien, @chrisbrogan, @johngies, @zerotimeselling (Andy Paul), @jillkonrath, @robincarey, @ianbrodie, and more, I have gotten to know personally – through social media.

Social media are a “starter drug,” if you will; just because you “friend” someone on social media doesn’t mean you’ll end up being real friends.  But increasingly, a lot of real friends start out with the online “friend” channel.

Online “friends” may not be friends, but they can be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.