Trust on the Toll Road

/0 Comments/in /by

A good friend of mine, Bob, recently lost his mother.  Following the funeral, disheveled and still in mourning he took to the road to return to Boston.  Approaching the tolls at the New York Thruway, he tried to slow down and discovered he had no brakes. 

In the split second Bob had to choose what to do, he examined his options.  Hit the cement barrier and risk getting hit from behind or go through the toll and hope the car in front of him was moving away thereby minimizing the risk of injuring someone.  He decided to put the car in park–which only slowed the car a little–and go through the toll. 

Unfortunately the car in front didn’t move away.  Luckily no one was hurt. 

When the police officer showed up, he too had a choice.  He had to determine whether it was, in fact, an accident and that Bob was telling the truth about his brakes failing, or if he was simply telling a tale to get out of a ticket by swaying responsibility. 

The officer chose a third option–he assumed Bob was trying to avoid the $1.25 toll.  What made this officer ignore the more likely choices and go for dishonesty of the third kind?  Was it Bob’s disheveled look?  Did he sound drunk? 

I can understand if the officer thought Bob was lying to avoid a ticket. He’s probably seen many people run through tolls.  What baffles me is why he would think Bob would run a toll when there was a car at the toll booth.   What made him select the most improbable scenario?

The implications for trust are profound.   We can influence our own trustworthiness by reducing our self-orientation, and increasing our credibility, reliability and intimacy. 

Yet those factors don’t operate in a rational vacuum when we consider whether to trust others.   Our upbringing, general experience, specific experiences, psychological makeup and even job responsibilities go into the mix. 

Put yourself in the shoes of the police officer.  Perhaps something similar happened in the past.  Maybe he’s heard so many excuses, that everything sounds like a variation on the theme.  Maybe he was just having a difficult day. 

Maybe he trusted someone’s story that turned out to be a lie once too often.  We want to be trusted, and we would like ourselves and others to be trusting.  We have to recognize when our own issues get in the way of trusting others.  And hope that our own hard work to be trustworthy will be enough for others to trust us. 

What happened to Bob?  The tow truck driver confirmed that the brakes failed.  

And the officer made my friend pay the toll, just in case.

Baseball, Billy Budd, and Business

/4 Comments/in /by

Dog bites man? All the time, no news.   Man bites dog? That’s news.

Art imitates life? All the time, no news. Life imitates art? That’s news.

It was big news indeed last week in the archetypal, but lately not-so-king-of-sports American world of baseball. Here are the bare facts. 

Armando Galarraga nearly pitched a perfect game for the Detroit Tigers. With two out in the 9th, umpire Jim Joyce mistakenly called a runner safe at first on a ground ball. 

For our many friends in the rest of the world, to whom baseball is a distant competitor to futbol, here is some context.

A ‘perfect game’ is about the rarest statistic in baseball. By contrast, no-hitters and shut-outs are positively commonplace. In roughly a century of statistics–I’m guessing about a quarter of a million official games—this event has happened only 18 times since 1900. That’s less than once every 5 years on average.

Help me out, All Blacks fans, what’s the equivalent? Those of you who follow Man-U and Juventus, what’s comparable? And hey cricket fans, am I right this is more rare than scoring 100 runs and taking 5 wickets in an innings?

Anyway, that’s what was at stake. And everyone admitted the umpire blew the call. Including the umpire. Which takes us to Stage 2.

Lessons in Taking Responsibility, Lessons in Acceptance

Within an instant, the fans, the announcers, the commentators, the media, were all over umpire Joyce in the massive condemnation of his blown call, and in enraged sympathy for Galarraga’s near-miss of sports immortality for a mistake patently not his own.

And then, it all went to a new level. Within minutes, Joyce—widely acknowledged as one of the best umpires in the game–knew what he’d done, and acknowledged his mistake. In fact, he went beyond acknowledgement. 

“I did not get the call correct. I kicked the s**t out of that call. I just missed the damn call. I missed it from here to the wall. At the time, I really thought I had got the call right. Now that I’m standing here and I’ve seen it on the replay…I missed it. This isn’t “a” call. This is a history call. I kicked the s**t out of it. And there’s nobody that feels worse than I do. I take pride in this job, and I kicked the s**t out of it, and I took a perfect game away from that kid over there that worked his ass off all night. It’s probably the most important call of my career, and I missed it.”

And what did Galarraga have to say about this assault on his lifetime record?

 “Nobody’s perfect…I’m sure that guy felt worse than me, twenty times. He’s a professional, I’m a professional…I feel sad…but it’s part of the game, nobody’s perfect.”

The next day, the Tigers made another great gesture by sending Galarraga up to home plate to deliver the day’s line-up to the umpire—Mr. Joyce. Joyce teared up; no words were exchanged, a knowing pat on the back conveying all that needed to be said. Then on with the game.

A total, Complete Class Act. By both parties. A diamond moment in a rough world.

But wait, there’s more.

Lessons from Herman Melville for Business

One of the ways in which baseball is an anachronism is its continued refusal to adopt the instant replay, a feature already completely accepted in (American) football and tennis. At moments like this, the hue and cry to change the rule was deafening. Yet Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig refused to change the call. 

Because to overrule that call, blatant though it was, would be to instantly change the nature of the commissioner’s job by making him the head umpire, the court of last resort on close calls.

It’s easy to critique Selig. It’s harder to see why he’s upholding something very valuable here. To get a better perspective on it, we have to go to literature.

Billy Budd was the book, Herman Melville’s posthumously published novella. I remember it as impossibly abstract—a morality tale with only the thinnest connection to reality. Until last week, when Galarraga and Selig made it real for me.

Galarraga is, of course, Billy Budd—the complete innocent, a person of grace, born illegitimate child and later orphaned—yet whom everyone loves. In a heated moment, Budd makes a mistake—a mistake no one blames him for. But the mistake calls, by law, for the death sentence.

The roles of Joyce and Selig are combined in the book in Captain Vere, the man who must decide against the morally innocent but technically guilty Budd. And he does his job well. Billy Budd’s last words before being hanged are, “God bless Captain Vere,” thus indicating his acceptance of the code over even his own life.

[Sidebar: I find the summaries in the Wikipedia entry for Billy Budd to be insipid and trivial. Literature has suffered over these last few decades from the attack on criticism by the likes of Jacques Derrida. The result is trivial speculation on metaphors for historical events and scenarios of subconscious homo-eroticism. Deconstructionists wouldn’t recognize a moral fable if Aesop hit them in the face with a 2×4].

Lessons from Baseball for Business

Baseball used to be the sports metaphor for business, and business delighted in metaphor. Interestingly, baseball was always the more individual of the sports—football being an extreme team sports, and basketball somewhere in the middle; this fit well with the focus on the heroic individual in business.

Baseball in the US is still big business. But in general, the “hot” sports and sports stars tend more recently to be from basketball or football. We haven’t seen a huge baseball movie since Field of Dreams—two decades ago.

Within baseball, the Detroit Tigers (my boyhood favorite team—shout-out to Al Kaline) haven’t been leaders for some time. Detroit itself is a city fallen on hard, hard times. 

So it’s all the more striking that this shot to the gut decent example comes from a Detroit Tigers pitcher, a workingman umpire–and a regulator.

Think of what lessons business could and should be drawing—if they were still following baseball for lessons like this.

Let’s just be clear what the lessons are here.

Lesson 1. From umpire Joyce: face facts. Deal with reality. And the minute you see the facts are against you, call it. Call it on yourself. Take full responsibility. 

(Suggested readers: William Weldon, CEO of Johnson & Johnson; Tony Hayward, CEO of BP).

Lesson 2. From pitcher Galarraga: accept life gracefully. Do all that you can; when you win, be gracious; and when you lose, that’s when you really demonstrate class.

(Suggested reader: Jeffrey Skilling).

Lesson 3: From Commissioner Selig. Celebrate the humanity of sports, business, life. The humanity of the sport really does transcend winning and losing. 

It’s not about win-lose. Life itself is not fair, as every parent momentarily recalls in that moment when they preach to their kids. What really does count is how you play the game. He who wins is the one who does the best job of accumulating points sufficient to cover the odds of random crap, i.e. life, showing up as coincidence.

(Suggested readers: Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein; and, to be fair, all the rest of us too).

A Tale of Two Books: Jill Konrath’s SNAP Selling, and The MBA Oath

/3 Comments/in /by

If you’re a regular Trust Matters reader, I believe you expect high standards from this blog. I’m not about to let you down by recommending weak books. Here are two new books of which I think highly.

SNAP Selling, by Jill Konrath.

I know Jill. She is smart, sassy, Midwest-values based, Minnesota-friendly—and in-your-face New York blunt. It shows in her books, her blog, and her articles. 

Jill is a salesperson turned sales consultant, trainer and author. She has all the tactics and specifics you’d hope for from a good sales book—but she’s grounded in the kind of deep, ethical perspectives on sales that I respect.

SNAP stands for Simple, iNvaluable, Aligned, and Priority. Okay, another acronym; but a good one. Her premise is that everyone is hard-pressed these days, thus every interaction has to count. Every interaction has to meet those criteria.

Jill has tons of practical advice; but I confess I’m even more drawn to the premise underlying all her work. For example: she’s down on ‘always-be-closing’ tactics; sales is ‘no longer a numbers game,’ and my favorite: “sales is an outcome, not a goal.”

I believe you can judge an author by the people who agree to write a blurb for the book itself. Here are a few for whom I have great respect: Mike Schultz,  Keith Ferrazzi, Mahan Khalsa, Dave Stein, Sharon Drew Morgan. And I’m honored to be on that list too.

The MBA Oath, by Max Anderson and Peter Escher.

I first wrote about the MBA Oath a year ago, in early June, 2009. I was very favorably impressed.

I later sought out Peter Escher, co-author, and interviewed him last November. 

In January of this year, I participated in a “pro-con” Debate Room article on Businessweek.com. I took the position that the Oath would be effective. 

I have to confess, I was shocked at the vehemence of the cynicism reflected in the responses to that article. They accused the oath-propagators of being cynical, stupid, venal, naïve, ignorant, and—in one case—anti-capitalist. 

Well, this book—The MBA Oath—is the answer to every one of those complaints, if the complainers will only take the time to read it.

I expected this to be a quick book; it was hurriedly written and produced—but it has depth way beyond books written over years.  

Perhaps this is due in part to the early influence on the authors of the faculty member who’s just been elected Dean of Harvard Business School, Nitin Nohria, a man who had considered just such an oath years ago.

I also suspect the influence of a legend in publishing, Adrian Zackheim.

Anderson and Escher are generous in their acknowledgements to these and many others. But there’s no denying a truth: these two have written a helluva thoughtful book. There are a dozen places in this book touching on topics I’ve blogged about where I thought, “Darn, they said it better than I did.” 

To many, the most powerful part of the book is the second part, where the Oath’s statement of purpose and 8 promises are detailed, with a chapter for each. These are thoughtful, nuanced discussions about issues like ethics and the law, man’s relation to man, and the purpose of business.

They are as comfortable citing Immanuel Kant and John Rawls as they are taking apart Milton Friedman, while still knowing their marketing history and staying current with Michael Jensen and Dan Ariely. 

But I find Part I, The Profession, the most compelling. Here the authors diagnose just what went wrong. None of these insights are unique, but they are very well assembled. Consider:

Markets rely on rules and laws, but those rules and laws in turn depend on truth and trust. Conceal truth or erode trust, and the game becomes so unreliable that no one will want to play…We will be left to rely increasingly on governments for the creation of our wealth, something that they have always been conspicuously bad at doing. Charles Handy

Sociologist Robert Merton argued that codes have enormous influence on behavior because they provide guidelines. They can produce negative emotions of shame when the code is broken or positive feelings of pride when it is kept…

In 1908, when Harvard began the world’s first two-year masters program in management education, it was called a “great, but delicate experiment” by Lawrence Lowell, who went on to become president of the university…

When HBS opened its campus in 1908, Owen Young, the president of General Electric, said… “Today the profession of business at Harvard formally makes its bow to its older brothers and holds its head up high…Today and here business formally assumes the obligations of a profession, which means responsible action as a group, devotion to its own ideals, the creation of its own codes, the capacity for its honors, and the responsibility for its own discipline.

In other words, the foundation of Harvard Business School sounded one helluva lot like The MBA Oath.

The authors brilliantly point out a major inflection point: major reports by the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation in the 1950s. They examined business education, and found it wanting. Specifically, they said it needed to look more like regular academic education.

That was the beginning of the end. As the authors put it:

The purpose of business schools changed. It was no longer to turn management into a profession; it was to turn management into a science. Professors became more like academics elsewhere, researching increasingly narrow and obscure areas so they could publish and win the esteem of their peers. The focus on training leaders who could competently and responsibly manage complex organizations was almost lost in a new age of training analysts with the newest financial formulas. The “great, but delicate experiment” of turning management into a profession had ended.

This book deserves a lot more readership than its admittedly necessary title will probably grant it. Anyone with interest in corporate ethics, regulation, the law, general education, industrial economics, corporate strategy and general management would in my opinion be well-advised to read it. 

Among other things, the book itself goes a good way to restoring the moral currency of the MBA degree.

Amy Gross on Discipline

/4 Comments/in /by

It’s like catching a glimpse of yourself reflected in a store window. Or conjuring up a fragment of a tune. Yesterday I ran across a wonderful article I had clipped from a very old Vogue magazine, from a time where covers featured models and clipping really meant getting out the scissors. It was called “The New Discipline,” (Vogue, January 1979) and was written by Amy Gross. It’s so good I wish I could just quote the whole thing.

Gross is talking about entering the eighties, and longing for or experiencing a new discipline, a desire to be grown up from the sixties’ idea of “freedom.” It remains one of the loveliest descriptions of “discipline” I’ve ever read. Some snippets:

~ Discipline is remembering what you really want … a technique for reaching from wish to fulfillment.

~ Discipline simplifies life, enforces clean decisions, asks tough questions. 

~ [Discipline says] Choose one. It is the art of refusal.

~ The new discipline is not obedience to an external power but an internal system. The new discipline is guided not so much by rules as by rhythm. The rhythm of alternatives.

~The new discipline is gentle rather than punitive. It is a way of getting the best from oneself. It is remembering, keeping in mind, what you really want.

She uses a quote from Rollo May: “Will is the capacity to organize oneself so that movement in a certain direction or toward a certain goal may take place.” 

Gross goes on to write: “Will – the clarity of aim – is most of discipline, and the mover is energy. Urgency must be a factor too… And patience. ..  And a certain still-point…”

The eighties fell far short of this model, indeed were probably the antithesis, but I for one am willing to try again. Thank you, Amy Gross.

I’m Just a Soul Whose Intentions Are Good

/3 Comments/in /by

I’m just a soul whose intentions are good;
Oh Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood.

Don’t Let me Be Misunderstood, by Benjamin, Caldwell, Marcus 

So goes the song (written for Nina Simone, made famous by The Animals). Heaven forbid: Oh lord, please—don’t let me be misunderstood.

Being misunderstood is a terrible thing, we say. My intentions are what’s important, we say—look at my intentions, not at my actions. Then you’ll understand me.

The US criminal justice system, as we’ll forever be reminded from Law & Order reruns, has two parts: the police, who investigate crime, and the district attorneys, who prosecute the offenders.

At least in the TV version, cops who are interested in understanding intention—intention leads to motive. It helps explain behavior, and leads to discovery.

In the courtroom, the crime is partially defined by intent. Killing someone with intent is generally considered more heinous than killing with no intention to do so. Sentencing, too, is affected by intent, as in ‘he still shows no remorse.’

We fear being misunderstood, of having bad motives attributed to us. Yet we attribute bad motives to others all the time. He has it in for me…he never listens to us…he only cares about getting his own…and so forth.

There is a constant interplay between intent and perception. It’s the territory that’s inhabited by PR firms and political consultants. And it’s that interplay that heavily determines trust, among other things.

Big Oil and Its Intent

While consuming gasoline this weekend in the great American pastime of driving while radio channel-flipping, I heard John Hoffmeister, former president of Shell Oil, respond to a question (I’m paraphrasing here by memory): “If BP really didn’t want a massive spill like this, then how can you explain their failure to have adequate prevention mechanisms in place?”

Hoffmeister then spoke some truth (again, by my memory): “Of course I wasn’t there, but in such situations, it’s often not the equipment—steel is steel—it’s the human, managerial part of the equation that goes wrong.”

It usually is. I sincerely doubt that a single employee of BP wants, desires, intends to spew hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. I sincerely doubt that anyone in BP is indifferent to the pain and suffering of living creatures and the ecosystem in coastal Louisiana. Yet those motives and worse are easily attributed to Big Oil. And hardly without reason.

The face of evil is far more mundane than the conspiracy theorists suggest. The excellent Wall Street Journal series  documents, at a micro-level, how good intentions can co-exist with disastrous decisions.

You can also destroy good intentions with an ongoing climate of fear, confusing goals, and conflicting pressures; see David Gebler’s account of unethical behavior.

How Good Intentions Get Subverted

It’s hard to do good from bad intentions. But Eric Burdon’s plea notwithstanding, good intentions not only won’t keep you from being misunderstood, they are impotent in the face of failure to act on them. The road to hell, it is said, is paved with good intentions.

What are some of the most common ways in which good intentions go bad? Here are a few.

1. “It’s not illegal.” Those who invoke the law as a way to justify their good intentions are scraping the bottom of the ethical barrel. Laws are simply the extreme version of social sanctions. Their presence means some proscription has gotten so odious that society chose to ossify it in a law. The absence of such ossification is so distant from evidence of good intentions as to be absurd. We rightly shame people who try to make the connection.

2. “It’s our policy.” Variations on the theme include “I was just following orders,” and “that’s just how things work.” At its best, this an evasion of personal responsibility by blaming things on a ‘system.’

3. “I had no choice.” On the face of it, like number 2, but accompanied by an anguished plea of being caught between rocks and hard places—there was no time, everybody was yelling at me to finish the job, it’s been done before…”

It’s a basal human trait to desire to be understood. More evolved human traits include the ability to detach from that desire, and at the same time do things in a ways that ensure good intentions are in fact clear.

How do investment bankers defraud entire nations? How do oil companies poison entire ecosystems? How do companies come to be mistrusted?

One step a time. One small, innocuous, seemingly inconsequential step at a time. The devil may lurk in our hearts, but he lives in the details.
 

Upcoming Events 5/28/10

/0 Comments/in /by

Summer is finally here! Marked by Memorial Day weekend, we hope all of you enjoy the holiday and official season change with family and friends. As for us, we’re gearing up for some new great events. Be sure to check out the below and join us for the increasingly happening month of June!

—–

Fri. June 4th          Worcester, MA          Stewart Hirsch

Stewart Hirsch will be facilitating his interactive program "How to Work a Room (and Still Feel Good About Yourself)™" for the Central Massachusetts Committee of the Women’s Bar Association. The program will be held at 12pm. No cost for the program. For more information, please contact Stewart at [email protected].

Wed. June 9th          Boston, MA          Charles H. Green

HBS Association of Boston: Charles H. Green speaks on "How to Win Sales and Influence People: the Art of Trust-based Selling." 6PM. Location: Hawes 101 on HBS Campus. Tickets available here.

Tues. June 15th       Global Access          Sandy Styer

Sandy Styer, the head of the Trusted Advisor Diagnostics group, will present the findings of the largest study on trustworthiness ever completed, our whitepaper entitled "Think Again", and the implications for business.  This research covered over 12,000 respondents. FREE. 10:00 EST. 30 minutes duration. Contact: [email protected] to register.

Tues. Sept. 28th          Washington, DC          Andrea Howe & Charles H. Green

Save the date for Trusted Advisor’s two day program co-led by Andrea Howe and Charles H. Green. More details and official registration information to come.


You Too Can Be a Strategy Consultant: Three Secret Tools Revealed

/11 Comments/in /by

You always suspected it, and I’m here to tell you it’s true.

The art of general management and strategic consulting lies in the mastery of a few simple tools. Now, despite the inevitable threats against my person made by parties who do not want to see the Truth revealed, I am about to share with you, Trust Matters readers, the Three Strategic Secret Sauces. Guard them carefully.

Secret Sauce One: The Rule of the Axes.

Short form: Draw two axes.  Now decide what to label them.

You’ve seen this rule before, though perhaps you never noticed it for what it was. Consider:

  • • The Laffer Curve: tax rates by governmental revenue
  • • The classic Business Barnyard Matrix: market share by growth rate of a business
  • • Newspaper headline font levels on disaster stories by distance between the paper’s home town and the location of the disaster
  • • New York Magazine’s Approval Matrix (highbrow/lowbrow by brilliant/despicable)

Why is the Rule of the Axes such a hit? Because it simplifies complexity, immediately giving the axes-author the appearance of wisdom.
(Close cousins: Occam’s razor, and the rule of “always use 3-4 bullet points”)

Secret Sauce Two: The 80-20 Rule.

Short form: Look for concentration—in anything.

Classic formulations of the 80-20 rule include:

  • • 80% of the revenue/profit comes from 20% of the clients
  • • 80% of the taxes are paid by 20% of the citizens
  • • 80% of the crimes are committed by 20% of the population
  • • 80% of the Ivy League admissions come from 20% of the population

The 80-20 rule works because it forces the mind toward points of leverage. A good strategist always looks for maximum effect with minimum resources—just like a military general, or a change manager.  (Note: it doesn’t have to actually be 80/20, in fact it rarely is.  Anywhere above 60/40 can work.)

Secret Sauce Three: Vicious and Virtuous Circles.

Short form: Find what works, or doesn’t; add a few interim steps, draw them in a circle to make it appear permanent.

Here are some examples:

  • • Parental abuse drives fear, which drives aggression, which drives pre-emptive defense, which drives abuse
  • • US auto companies give up low-margin segment, which drives market share for low-margin Asian competitors, which increases their volume, which lowers price, which lowers margins, which causes US auto companies to give up the next-lower margin segment
  • • You empower what you fear
  • • The fastest way to make a man trustworthy is to trust him.

The Circles are powerful because they force us out of traditional linear models, and because they make sense of what often appears contradictory. The Circles offer a narrative, and usually suggest points at which to intervene to change the narrative. They also sound amazingly like rules and laws of nature, even when they’re bogus.

So there you have it. And guess what:

  • • If you chart usage of these three tools against business success, you’ll find a clear correlation;
  • • In fact, 80% of general management and strategic consulting goes to the 20% who have mastered these three tools;
  • • The more these three tools get used, the better known they get, the more clients learn to recognize excellent tool mastery on the part of consultants, the more they get hired for excellent use of these three tools, and the more they get used.

Now you too can be quoted, command high rates, and gain that aura of the oracle that surrounds the Great Strategists. Just use the three tools.

Your financial tokens of gratitude for this revelation may be sent to me at trustedadvisor.com. Credit cards and PayPal are accepted. You’re welcome.
 

A Trust-based Organization: Bangor Savings Bank

/2 Comments/in /by

In the talks I give about trust in companies, I nearly always get asked for examples of companies that do it well. And I almost never have a good answer. I can identify plenty of very trustworthy, and trusting, individuals; but I have a much harder time pointing out trust-based organizations.

What do I mean by a trust-based organization? I mean an organization that actively encourages trustworthy and trusting behavior in its employees and with its various stakeholders. 

Why are there many personal examples; but so few corporate?

Unfortunately, the reason for that is very simple.  Fear.  Very few corporate organizations in the United States these days are willing to walk the talk, to put their money where their mouth is. I’m not talking about CSR initiatives: I’m talking about entire organizations that, as an organization, believe in:

  • People who live according to the trust equation, who focus on always being credible, reliable, intimacy-safe, and with low self-orientation;
  • Interactions that are based on respect and listening before giving advice;
  • Approaching problems by being client-focused, collaborative, long-term oriented, and transparent.

I wrote earlier this year about one such possible organization, Pediatric Services of America. Now I’ve got another for you: the Bangor Savings Bank, of Bangor, Maine.

I had the privilege and the pleasure of spending most of a day with about a quarter of the bank’s employees at an annual sales event and pizza / rewards night last week. And it was a sight to see.

This, my friends, is what a trust-based organization looks like. Let me give you some verbal snapshots, some big, some little, no particular order:

  • It’s a blue jeans western-themed event; my host, EVP John Edwards, encourages me to wear my best blues, and matches me;
  • The strategic plan is drenched in trust principles: long-term, customer-experience-based, direct communication, shared cultural values;
  • The annual numbers and the new year’s goals are passed out in local offices: this event is for celebration—of people, of success, and of principles (oh yeah, bonus checks get discreetly handed out too);
  • The event features 8 video profiles of 8 employees chosen as best representing 8 key values of the firm: including customer focus, long-term values, listening, caring and acting in customers’ best interests;
  • For four years, the leadership team has been pounding home a simple message: it is about customer experience, we believe in trust, it is about people, behaviors start with attitudes. All content in the event is anchored in these themes. They really mean their catch-phrase slogan: You Matter More.
  • (It’s worth mentioning the Bank involved another great change agent a few years ago, the making-miracles-in-the-trenches bank consulting firm of St. Meyer & Hubbard; Bangor SB is a feather in their cap)
  • EVP Edwards says, "Our CEO Jim Conlon repeatedly reminds our associates and our clients that: "The only reason we exist is that the people, businesses and organizations in our markets have chosen to do business with us. If you do the right things for the right reasons, good outcomes will ensue." Hear that? He talks of outcomes as results of principled behavior–not as goals per se.
  • These are definitely Mainers, but of a special type: not afraid to emote, and not afraid to directly confront issues. I heard a story about the courage it took to say ‘no’ to a motivated and profitable borrower;
  • I heard about a borrower who walked away from a loan deposit because he changed his mind about the project; the bank, with no need to do so, refunded his deposit.
  • Want to know what long-term and community-focused means? At Bangor SB, it means “we invest in these communities because we want our children to have good jobs in this state—it’s personal.”
  • The quote that opens and closes the strategic plan: “Customer experience is the reason we are here, it is everything.”
  • Edwards says, "We have learned that defining the customer experience is an organic exercise – our culture and personality is embedded within our own colleagues and we can best learn from each other. We must constantly strive to get better as there are always ways to improve.
  • You want numbers? The bank is beating its competitors on key metrics—market share, loan losses, growth in assets.

These are people who are passionate, engaged, profitable, and making a difference in their lives and those of their communities. If I had to boil it down to one thing, it is this: the consistent application of a core set of trust principles to all the bank’s affairs.

The fascinating question it raises is: why can’t won’t other companies do this? 

How v. Why, and Why Not?

/9 Comments/in /by

The May issue of the Center For Creative Leadership’s  e-newsletter features a short blurb on a new book by journalist and author Brian Carney. The book is called Freedom, Inc. and the article begins this way:

"We trust people to be adults in so many areas of their lives. But when they walk through the doors at work, we insist they need detailed rules and descriptions for how to do a job."

Carney has explored “the hidden cost of how” – the ways in which top-down, command-and-control companies don’t see opportunities, miss deadlines, and lose customers by employing detailed rules and prescribing exact procedures rather than trusting their employees to get the job done. At best, he argues, the culture of “how” leads to codification of inefficiency; at worst to disengaged and disgruntled employees.

One of the companies he studied was FAVI, a French manufacturer of a specific auto part. Jean-Francois Zobrist, the CEO of FAVI, makes the distinction between “Comment?” companies, or how companies in  French, and “Pourquois?” companies, the companies which ask their employees simply to understand why they do their jobs. Why companies relinquish control, ask their employees to do their work to meet the goal rather than the standards manual, and allow the freedom for innovation at every level.

Zobrist also argues that the culture of how encourages companies to measure all the wrong things: is the employee on time? did she produce up to standard?, rather than the only thing which matters: is the job well done, and is the customer happy?

This simple idea of moving from how to why companies seems so right to me that I wish I were the author. It seems so modern. It fits the model of the move to service industries (v. manufacturing, though we have seen that it works there as well) and of millennial employees (v. “ company men.”) It’s also another way of understanding what a trusted-based company looks like.

Let’s go a step farther, and take why companies – where each employee understands the mission and why she does her job – to why not companies, and ask everyone to question why not do things in a new way? No one knows the job better than the person who’s doing it every day, so let’s tear down those pseudo-inspirational posters of eagles and oceans extolling EFFORT and TEAMWORK, and instead ask in big letters WHY? And WHY NOT? Why am I doing this in the first place, and why not try it a new way?

A Trust Bubble?

/6 Comments/in /by

I read a blogpost about capital ratios entitled The Mystery of Capital.  A commenter to that post introduced an intuitively appealing term I hadn’t heard before: the “trust bubble,” as in

“what has popped is not really the housing bubble, nor even the credit bubble, but the trust bubble. And as always when a bubble bursts, we all rush to the opposite extreme. Now, no one trusts anyone else, economically or politically, and no society can function without trust.”

Credit for the line goes to commenter jrw, whose real name I can’t deduce from the un-hyperlinked initials. It’s an intuitively appealing turn of phrase, and I wasn’t the only one who found it a grabber.

But like so many things trust-related, it doesn’t bear up under examination. A bubble is when things inflate—we have a bubble in tulips, or in gold, or in tech stocks. They get over-valued, then the bubble breaks.

So—did trust get vastly overdone? Was trust over-rated, before it took a crash? Listen closely, and you can be forgiven for being confused; that is language crafted to obfuscate, not to clarify.

Another such grabber line is “trust but verify.” Like light beer, it sounds great–but has less meaning. Let me explain.

Deconstructing Trust

Let’s think very simply about how we use the word ‘trust’ in its most concrete sense. I trust you; or I don’t. You are trustworthy; or you’re not. If I (trust you), and you are (trustworthy), then the result is—trust.

In the above sentence, “I trust” is a verb, "trustworthy" is an adjective, and the resulting “trust” is a noun. Trust is a result, an outcome: it’s not a thing in and of itself.

Yet we have all manners of surveys purporting to measure ‘trust.’ What is it they’re actually measuring? In long run social surveys, ‘trust’ is often used to indicate people’s propensity to trust, i.e. the verb meaning from above.

But in other surveys, for example when we say “trust in Goldman Sachs is down,” do we mean that people are less trusting? Or do we mean that Goldman Sachs is less trustworthy? All we know from “trust in Goldman is down” is the end result.

Identifying the Real Trust Problem

You can’t create good social policy without knowing whether the problem lies with the trustor, or the trustee. Do we have a trust-ing problem? Or a trustworthiness problem?

Professor Roderick Kramer of Stanford doesn’t necessarily state that the problem lies in trust-ing, but that’s where he focuses on for solutions. Consumers can best protect themselves by practicing ‘tempered trust.’

That doesn’t mean he thinks Bernie Madoff is blameless, of course. But if one’s attention tends to be placed on what Madoff’s victims could have been done differently, it tends to draw attention away from Madoff’s assault on trustworthiness. Regardless of Kramer’s intent, the perhaps unintended effect is like what the mortgage brokers’ and credit card industries have said—the solution to abuse is better consumer education.

I want to say to those industries (please imagine here a full Lewis Black rant ‘n rage tone), “No It’s NOT! The solution to abuse is—to stop the abusers! Not to better educate the abused!”

While business surveys often fail to distinguish between ‘trust’ and ‘trusting,’ there are social trends scholars who are extremely precise about their measurements of trust, and about what trust means. A great example is Dr. Eric Uslaner, of the University of Maryland.

When Uslaner says trust is down (and he does), he means long-term propensity to trust, or what I’m calling trusting-ness.  Long-term as in decades and generations. And propensity as in do you tend to leave the door unlocked, do you impute bad motives to strangers. It’s a lot more psychological, broad, and deep-based than a temperature-taking about a specific institution or person compared to the same question a few months prior.

Again: what is it we think we’re measuring when we purport to measure trust?  It makes a difference.

Ronald Reagan Had It Wrong

He may have had it wrong many ways, but here I’m just talking about when he said, “trust, but verify.” Like the “trust bubble,” it sounds great. But in fact it plays on another ambiguity about trust. This ambiguity comes from the relationship between trust and risk.

If you think about it for a moment, there is no trust without risk. If there weren’t risk, we wouldn’t call it trust, we’d call it “probabilistic decision-making.” Bluntly put, if you have to verify, it ain’t trust.

There is one component of trust that is an exception to that statement—the idea of ‘reliability,’ as in ‘I can trust that pipeline won’t blow’—in which trust very much is linked to verification. But it’s the mechanical sense of trust; it has to do with engineering, physics, the behavior of impersonal forces. In all the other senses of trust—which touch on ideas like intentions, deception and transparency, and vulnerability—verification has precious little to do with it. Reagan was just speechifying.

Finally, there’s the comment that started this blogpost. Was there a bubble in trust? In trusting? Or in trustworthiness?

There certainly was not a trustworthiness bubble: quite the contrary—trustworthiness was declining with every level of derivative abstraction.

Nor does it seem to me there was a ‘trusting’ bubble. I don’t think people’s propensity to trust financial institutions was increasing at the same time general social trust was steadily declining.

And if both trustworthiness and trusting-ness were undergoing declines,then–how could there have been a "bubble of trust?"

The vocabulary of trust is seductive, but the meaning of trust is slippery. Be careful to think simply and clearly when it comes to broad generalizations about trust.  Bad stuff went down; it’s critical we think clearly about what is to be done.