December Carnival of Trust Accepting Admissions

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Every month the Carnival of Trust highlights ten of the best posts on trust, whether business related or not. The next carnival will be Monday December third. If you’ve written a post you think would be a good fit, or if you have read a post by someone else that you think would be great for the carnival I’d like to encourage you to submit it for the carnival.  This month’s host is John Crickett of Business Opportunities and Ideas.

Carnival Submission Guidelines:

  1. The Deadline for submissions is midnight, Thursday November 29th.
  2. Posts do not have to be business related. Trust in personal relationships, politics, or any other sphere of life are more than welcome, and, indeed, encouraged.

Posts can be submitted here.

If you’d like to read a sample Carnival of Trust, both Whisper and David Maister have hosted editions. I look forward to another excellent edition with your help.

Larry David, Seinfeld and Social Networking

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The technology of social networking is overrated. You still have to be able to communicate. Cartoons notwithstanding, in social networks everyone does know you’re a dog—and it doesn’t take long to learn it.

Might there be learning in studying those who are not good at networking with others?

A recent New Yorker item describes how workers with the mentally ill have discovered a powerful tool: the comedic stylings of HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, by Larry David (co-creator, with Jerry Seinfeld, of the hit TV show Seinfeld).

Those being studied represented several forms of alienation from society at large (they were schizophrenics, if memory serves me). The researchers discovered that the patients responded to situation comedies portraying social ineptitude. They could relate, it turns out.

The logical endpoint of that insight was Curb Your Enthusiasm. For those who don’t know Larry David’s brilliant show, picture Seinfeld if HBO did it, and every episode had George at its center.

Jason Alexander (Seinfeld’s George) describes an early-season reading where he questioned George’s motivation for something: “I don’t know anyone who would do that.” Larry David responded brightly, “I would.” And Alexander says, “suddenly I understood the George character. It was all Larry.”

Larry David (he plays himself on Curb) is cheerfully, honestly, forthrightly neurotic and self-centered to the nth degree. It’s not that he’s proud of it; he’s just saying that’s what he is.

The fun, of course, is that David is merely more honest than the rest of us. We can laugh at him without directly facing the social pain that his behaviors cause us when we commit them—which we do, all the time. He is our public court jester. He speaks the truth in a socially acceptable manner—as comedy, with a subtext we needn’t publicly acknowledge. But we know it. He’s doing public self-psycho-analysis, and we’re along for the ride.

That’s why he’s a hit with mental patients—and with the rest of us too. We’re not qualitatively different—it’s just a matter of degree. “Sanity” is a wispy line; it’s hard to say where the hill ends and the mountain begins.

It’s an old sitcom formula. Nearly every I Love Lucy episode begins with a prank gone wrong, spiralling out of control. The comedy consists in watching Lucy lie about what’s happening, until the lie is unsustainable, and she must surrender to reality. We relate to her frantic mania, knowing that Ricky will forgive her in the end. On TV, that is. In real life, Ricky rarely forgives—or so we fear.

Every single Seinfeld episode with George is about the inability to maintain a neurotic fiction he has created in the face of a reality-based onslaught. He is owned by his fibs about Vandalay industries and his casual claims about Hamptons real estate. His only success in life comes when he resolves to do everything the opposite of his instincts.

George, Lucy, Larry—they cannot tell the truth in a socially acceptable manner. We learn by watching their comic misery, because we too suffer from that inability, and are alienated from others because of it.

A lot of coming to trust others is learning how to speak the truth in a socially acceptable manner; to marry radical truth-telling with our conventions of propriety.
We learn much of it not by learning lines, or by watching others do it well, or by learning the principles of effective communication. We also learn by watching social train wrecks, made palatable by humor.

We learn many things—like truth-telling—more by seeing negative examples than by seeing positive ones by themselves. Much corporate training is afflicted by an abundance of softened edges, watered-down empathy and general happy-talk. But truth isn’t truth if it has to be constantly watered down. You can’t enable people into overcoming their addictions to neuroticism.

To get along in the social networking world of the future (or of today), don’t just bone up on good behaviors. Make it a point to study disasters too.

Just make sure you’re laughing most of the time.

 

How to Develop a Critical Database People Will Trust

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New economy opportunities for trust come from the ability to create, access and share databases about people. And of course one of the largest risks to the use of large databases is the consequence of getting it wrong.

Sometimes getting it wrong can have trivial consequences—a wrong phone number. Or, the consequences can be serious, even fatal—wrong data in a medical report, or evidence in a capital case.

What’s the best way to ensure clean data? Is it cross-checking databases? Multiply redundant systems? Multiple data-entry? Random audits?
Some of us frequent travelers recall being caught in a false-negative trap a few years ago at the airports: being pulled out of line in security checks because our names were somehow linked to terrorism.

There were thousands of these cases, I recall. I was one, and it took several months to clear it up. It was annoying, though I confess to some small measure of pleasure at the notoriety, as long as it didn’t go on too long.

Fixing the list of terrorists: now, that’s one database worth getting right. And worth looking at how they did it.

Timothy Clark is Editor and President of GovernmentExecutive.com, which produces several informative newsletters about the federal government.

Recently, Shane Harris wrote about Making a List.
 

The FBI’s Web site describes the Terrorist Screening Center as an "anxious" place, full of "serious faces — like you see at NASA’s Mission Control right before a launch."

"The TSC is essentially a call center, handling queries from law enforcement, security and intelligence agencies all asking the same basic question: Is the guy we just stopped at the border or pulled out of an airline queue, a known or suspected terrorist? The FBI calls it "one-stop shopping."

"The TSC was established to consolidate the dozens of so-called terrorist watch lists that proliferated across government before and immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks. …how it was created gives you a good idea of how difficult information sharing really is, and what intelligence agencies face today as they struggle to get on the same page.

"Who decides what names go on the list? Settling that question was one of the TSC’s first challenges. The agencies with a stake in the list all had their own way of handling information, and each had different ideas about names they wanted to add.

"The screening center laid out some basic criteria for adding a name. First, an individual had to have some demonstrable nexus to terrorism. An agency couldn’t just tell the center, "trust us," Bucella said. Every day, the TSC would get an upload of 300 to 500 names. Those weren’t all new; some included updated information about existing names. But the pace was relentless.

"Perhaps inevitably, then, people who shouldn’t have been on the list ended up there anyway. It wasn’t uncommon to drill down on a name and discover that someone an agency had encountered wasn’t actually the person on the list, even though the two shared the same name, Bucella said. But when the TSC did get a hit, day or night, officers would contact the person who had added the name.

"… building and maintaining the watch list is more of an art than a science.  But that’s to be expected from such a subjective endeavor. The consolidated watch list is, in its own right, a legitimate bureaucratic success. But how it was built and how it is maintained lets you in on one of the hard realities about sharing intelligence and hunting for terrorists: Mistakes are unavoidable.

Digital systems can never be fully insulated from the analog world.  Trust can never be fully automated. 

That doesn’t mean digital approaches to trust aren’t valuable; it just means they’re not omnipotent.

Trust-based Selling in the Real World: Case Study #24

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“Alex” (not his real name) is a friend and ex-client.

Alex leads a Private Client practice for a private wealth management firm in a country whose name I will not reveal, but which lies somewhere to the north of the United States.

We talked about his approach to managing his clients’ money. First thing he notes—it’s not just about managing their money.

“They need help from time to time in various aspects of their lives,” Alex says. “I get to know about these issues because they have financial impacts. Marriage, Children, College, Divorce, Insurance, Disease, I hear about them all. It is important to weave all aspects of the client’s life through their financial affairs, nothing personal happens in isolation.

“I cultivate a network of people I know, respect, and trust. Exceptional people who understand the power of relationships; people in real estate; divorce mediation specialists; psychologists; medical specialist; and educators who can help my clients. Whatever it is that they need—I make it my business to help them.

What do your colleagues think of this, I ask?

“They don’t get it. They say there’s no money in those things. I say that’s not the point… I’m in this profession to help people. But in the long term, they are dead wrong—in fact, there is money in this.

“For example, I spent an hour talking with the19-year-old daughter of a client about how to manage her $3,000. I took flak from colleagues for that too. But what they forget is how delighted her father was that his daughter was getting sound financial advice at age 19.

"And he has considerably more than $3,000… as will his daughter, sooner or later. My relationship is with their family.”

“What my colleagues forget is that this is a relationship business. Clients are referred by their parents, their children, friends, colleagues, accountants, lawyers etc. This only happens if you play for the long run.

“But it works; it works beautifully. Some people in my business focus on their transactional income, or look for ways to go seeking more clients through seminars or mailings. I focus on the relationships with my clients and appreciate when they invest in my business through referrals… my cost of marketing is nil.

“But perhaps most importantly, I spend my working days helping people, people I like. My practice is built on relationships where I enjoy working with the clients and they enjoy working with us. How much better can work get?”

How Does Wealth Inequality Affect Trust?

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An old Frank Zappa lyric went, “What’s the ugliest part of your body? I think it’s your mind.”

Similarly, we might ask, “What’s the lowest-trust place in (corporate) America? I think it’s Wall Street.”

Which brings us to the latest issue of Harvard Business School Working Knowledge.

I find HBSWK a pleasure to read—they identify the coolest topics for study. The treatment of those topics—well, that can be quirky.

One fascinating current item is “The Dynamic Interplay of Inequality and Trust: An Experimental Study,” by Ben Greiner, Axel Ockenfels, and Peter Werner.

Here’s the (partial) synopsis:

We study the interplay of inequality and trust in a dynamic game, where trust increases efficiency and thus allows higher growth of the experimental economy in the future. We find that trust is initially high in a treatment starting with equal endowments, but decreases over time. In a treatment with unequal endowments, trust is initially lower yet remains relatively stable.

Cool! An egalitarian society shows a greater decay of trust than one with initially disparate endowments? The implications for political theory, economic policy and social dynamics are juicy, to say the least.

The “dynamic game” the authors use to add some empirical juice to theoretical discussions involves a trustor and a trustee. In a series of interactions, the trustor offers a sum of money to the trustee, which sum is then multiplied by the game; the trustee then returns a certain amount to the trustor.

As the authors say, “The amount sent can be interpreted as a measure of trust, while the amount returned measures the degree of trustworthiness.”

Then ensues 20 pages of analytical bludgeoning. Did you know about the Wilcoxon Matched Pairs Signed Ranks (WMPSR) test? Me neither. Did you know the lowest Gini factor ever measured was in Bulgaria in 1968?

I am numbed and humbled; you could say I’m numbled.

And sure enough, the graphs show a decrease in trust if all players start equally, vs. a low-trust start with sustained low trust if players begin with inequality.

But wait a minute! What happened to Frank Zappa?

The appendix lists the instructions given to the players in this game. Here they are:

Welcome! You can earn money in this experiment. How much money you earn depends on your decisions and the decisions of the other participants…it is guaranteed that you do not ineract with the same participant in two subsequent rounds…The identity of the participant you are interacting with is secret, and no other participant will be informed about your identity.

OK, so I want to measure the role of trust and inequality in an economy. Where should I go?

Los Angeles? Omaha? Detroit?

Nah. Let’s go somewhere people aren’t distracted by entertainment, or meat-packing, or cars.

Let’s go where people interact solely around money. Anonymously. And never with the same person twice. (Blindfolds and knives might make it even more interesting).

And let’s call that a trust experiment.

If this game had a geographical correlate, it would have to be the Land of Gekko, where Fear and Greed are baseline hiring criteria—Wall Street.

Not exactly where I would have suggested one go searching for insights about trust.

What’s the ugliest part of that trust? I think it’s the game.

 

Trust Enablement

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Readers of Trust Matters know that I tend to focus on a certain side of trust—the human, complex, messy, emotional, non-linear side of things.

In part this is a personal reaction to my own MBA and corporate background, which emphasized the other side—the linear, rational, cognitive, quantitative side of things.

And in part it’s a reaction to the dominant model in business—which resembles more the latter than the former.

But it takes both sides to get a full view of trust. So I want to take this post to acknowledge someone who does a fine job working the other side of the street.

It is Alex Todd, President of Trust Enabling Strategies.

Alex talks about Trust Enablement®, and has developed what he calls has developed what he calls the Trust Enablement Program™.

He defines trust as “acceptable uncertainty,” and suggests that:

In essence, where Risk Management is all about protecting what you have, Trust Enablement™ is all about getting what you want by, in effect, proactively managing the risks of the relying party (or customer).

I don’t know anyone else who’s gone further in an attempt to systematically and quantitatively describe attributes of trust and applications of trust to management.

Todd’s site is worth visiting if you want to delve into measurement and management issues, or if you simply want to stretch your mind about the issues of trust in business.

He also has the best collection of trust-related quotes I’ve seen.

I don’t always see things the way Todd does, but he is clear, clean, broad and thorough in his thinking. He is usually persuasive, but always insightful.

Anyone interested in trust should not miss his work.

Greed in the Social Networking Space

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It took the advertising industry about 150 years to get to the point of putting ads on the inside of bathroom doors. It took considerably less for the commercial vultures to zero in on the social network phenomenon. Except this time, it’s an inside job.

First, MySpace. In July of this year, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation bought MySpace, making a few more mega-zillionaires out of kids who were in it for kicks.  Murdoch knew better, and immediately set about “monetizing” his investment.

How’s it going for his target audience?

In the words of a college freshman, Marshall Green:

MySpace is going to end up just like Friendster.  Except for bands, some high school kids I know still use it but the trend has shifted to Facebook.

I think the main reason is the site design. MySpace just has a terrible interface that continues to deteriorate as the developers tack on extra features that Facebook integrates better.

The thing that Facebook does well, finding other people you know and connecting with them, are more of an afterthought on MySpace.

Instead of using AJAX and web 2.0 technology to update the page without reloading the whole thing or taking you to a new page, MySpace makes you jump through a bunch of screens to do simple things like leave comments. This is basic stuff that MySpace has neglected to do because they are lazy!

What’s worse is the amount of ads. Most ads on MySpace are sketchy, and in the past have linked to adware and spammers. Half the time when you visit their front page, the entire background is a giant ad for a Fox TV show or movie. It’s obtrusive and detracts from the experience.

It all gives you the sense that the company doesn’t care about delivering a good experience, they just want to make a lot of money with as little work as possible. The interface was never spectacular, but I noticed more ads and a slowdown in new features following the Fox takeover.

(Full disclosure: I am related to young Mr. Green by marriage; his mom’s to me).

That was several weeks ago. On November 6, the “good guys” in this space—Facebook—announced their new approach to incorporating advertising into that ostensibly wholesome society.

The gist of Facebook’s idea is to allow Big Advertisers in to make “friends” of existing users, and to build their reputation by demonstrating the “trust” that one’s “friends” have in the product being advertised.

As one wag put it, “so it’s like spamming your friends?”

You know you’re in for it when language gets reinvented, a la doubletalk like this from Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO and new gazillionaire:

Q: “Are you worried this will make Facebook too commercial?”
Z: “Actually I think this will make it less commercial because the ads now are [more generic].”

For a deliciously cynical take on this, see Nicholas Carr’s blog .

Marshall’s view?

If I start seeing notifications and friend requests everywhere from Coca Cola and Exxon Mobil, then Facebook will be on the way out for me. There are already some sneaky ads that masquerade as friend notifications. They trick you and I’ve nearly clicked on them several times before realizing they were ads.

If it gets as bad as MySpace people will find something better. There will obviously be another new trend in social networking sites in the future anyhow.

It’s been clear for centuries that you can always find success by going more down-market in taste than the last guy; more negative in political advertising than the other guy; and more overtly commercial than your competitor.

The question is: where’s the bottom?

When trust is just a tactic, “friends” are not what they seem, and social networks are flipped into cynical mouthpieces for corporate America, it feels like we’re pretty low.

Maybe Marshall’s right in thinking his generation will reject the hype.

But as H. L. Mencken said, “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.”

I wouldn’t short Murdoch and Zuckerberg just yet.

Tony Blair and the Subprime Mortgage Crisis–It’s the Basics

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On November 8, the Washington Speaker’s Bureau booked a nice commission when former Prime Minister Tony Blair was paid $500,000 for a 20-minute talk to Chinese industry and government officials in Hong Kong.

Not a bad sum, even in US dollars. Blair’s Chinese market rate is now 2X the former reigning champion, one William Jefferson Clinton (and 5X Rudy Giuliani’s rate, according to the Financial Times (print edition, Nov. 9, 2007).

But all was not sweetness and light. Several attendees groused that Blair’s talk was full of platitudes and banalities.

As the China Youth Daily paper said, "To be honest, Mr Blair’s speech sounds so familiar. It’s just like the report of any Chinese county level official and contains no novelty. If the local political and business circles paid such a high price for a speech they could have made themselves, was it worth it?

A ripoff?. A con job? A typical politician hussle—take the big bucks, give nothing in return, smile all the way to the bank—and don’t give up a thing?

So it sounds in the papers.

There is, of course, another way to put it. Maybe Blair spoke the truth, and the audience just didn’t want to believe it. Maybe the road to global leadership isn’t a “secret” after all—maybe it’s one of those platitudes like “5% inspiration and 95% perspiration,” “common sense is uncommon,” and “just keep hitting singles.”

Maybe it’s back to basics.

Maybe it’s human nature to prefer something splashy. We want cleverness—we’re disappointed when the answer turns out to be a banality we’ve heard since the cradle. We want to believe others’ success is a trick. Back to basics? Don’t wanna hear it.

Wall Street loves quantitative cleverness. Take the SIV, or Structured Investment Vehicle. SIVs are asset-based products with tiers of risk deconstructed and repackaged, which let offerors capitalize on short vs. long-term spreads.

Problem; buyers used short-term debt to fund long-term products. Back to basics: match your maturities.

Moody’s now says, “many managers have told us they now do not expect to see the SIV model survive in its current form." (FT, November 9, “SIVs Face Fight to Survive, Says Moody’s”).

Morgan Stanley saw the subprime mortgage crisis coming a year ago, and designed a clever hedge. It bought credit default swaps (a side bet against subprime mortgages). And, to get the swaps insurance for free, they bought the least risky tranches of subprime—still high return. Voila—a free lunch.

Unfortunately, the least risky tranches of subprime also crashed and burned, overwhelming the insurance. “They were so right, they were wrong” says the FT. (Morgan Stanley Peers Through the Looking Glass, Darkly”, FT, Friday Nov. 9, p. 26).

Back to Wall Street basics: pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered.

I have recently re-discovered John Gottman’s research on marriage. He talks about “bids”—basically little reach-outs to one another. Healthy marriages average about 70 bids in a given time period—unhealthy marriages, something like 20% as many.

We resist this line of basic thought. We want to believe in flowers, candles and soft lights. The Secret. The Ice Cream Diet. The latest technology. The “this time it’s different” stock market. If someone else succeeds—they must have had an inside angle.

Then the correction happens, and we see clearly yet again. It’s the little things. It’s hitting singles, not homers. It’s blocking and tackling. It’s no pain, no gain. It’s just eat less calories. It’s practice, practice, practice. It’s buy low, sell high. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably isn’t true.

It’s the basics.

Just ask Warren Buffett. Larry Bird. Ask Oprah. Or Tony Blair. The advice might be worth it. Even at Tony Blair’s rates.

Case Study #17: Trust-based Selling in the Real World

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I bought some designer eyeglasses 18 months ago at Pildes Optical in Short Hills, New Jersey. I was well-served, and happy with the glasses.

A few weeks ago a tiny screw came loose. I took it in. The screw had to be factory-ordered—it was made of gold (I said they were designer).

They called me when the part came in, and I went to the store. While the manager was replacing the screw, I asked the Associate about getting a backup pair for travel overseas. I didn’t want to spend as much.

“You don’t have to,” she explained. “Here are some perfectly good-looking frames that are about half the price; if they’re just a backup, you may not care as much about the aesthetics."

“Also,” she continued, “you may not want all the features you have in the lenses themselves. You can get a perfectly good backup pair by changing a mix of lens and frame features."

"But”, she said, “how is your prescription? Does it need changing?”

“Well,” I replied, “my arms are getting a little short again when it comes to reading. It’s been a while since I got an exam.”

“You really shouldn’t think about getting a replacement set,” she said firmly, “until you’ve had your eyes examined again.”

“Actually,” I mused, “if I get a new set, then this one can be my backup, and it wouldn’t cost me anything.”

“There you go,” she smiled. “That would save you the most.”

The manager came out with my newly fixed glasses, and I took out my wallet. “No, no,” he waved his hand at me, “no charge.”
As I walked out, I realized what these people had done.

On the face of it, they turned down two transactions—a repair, and a sale (of backup glasses). But that’s just the surface.

At one level higher, they guaranteed a much bigger sale—a new set of eyewear for me—worth more than the two foregone transactions. Because they focused on the relationship, not the transaction.

At yet one level higher, they virtually guaranteed that that later sale would be to Pildes of Short Hills—not to anyone else. Because they focused on my needs, not theirs.

At a higher level still, they cemented my loyalty. Not just my repeat business; no, they got me to do something even more important. They got me to feel energized enough to, say, write about it for public consumption in my blog.

I think if I had asked them all this, they would have readily agreed to my analysis, but would probably tell me something like, “that makes sense all right, though we didn’t think it through that way. That’s just the way we believe in doing business.”

This is the paradox of Trust-based Selling®—-if you live by the principles of customer focus, collaboration, transparency and relationships-before-transactions, you will make more money than if you lived by the principle of trying to make money. It works in the real world.

And if you want to buy eyewear, I can recommend a good place.

 

 

Faking Customer Centricity

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Customer centricity is a powerful business concept. But that’s not all it is.

Properly done— Pepper and Rogers and One to One are the class act in this arena—it is key to an approach to business that combines social good and corporate success.

Done right, it’s a goal in itself—not a mere tactic for profitability. Profitability emerges as a byproduct, not as an overriding goal. True customer-centricity yields more profit than profit-centricity alone does.

But this view is up against a lot. The broader approach to business is centered on competitive advantage as the goal, and the shareholder stakeholder as the primary beneficiary. And that has a perverse impact on the idea of customer centricity.

Remember 60s radical Angela Davis? She was a student of Herbert Marcuse, a radical philosopher who developed the concept of “repressive tolerance.” Sounds contradictory (he was a Hegelian, for the philosophers in the crowd), but makes good sense (he was also perceptive).

It means, simply, the best way for a majority to neutralize a threatening minority is to develop an attitude of tolerance. That way, the majority system appears to be un-threatened, and the minority to be un-threatening. The status quo is the winner.

While that idea has some limits (it’s hard to tolerate violent terrorists beyond a certain point), it works pretty well in the realm of ideas.

Which is why “customer centricity” is so easily hijacked by the dominant ideology of competitive advantage. The competitive paradigm—our leading view of business today—is repressively tolerant of customer-centricity. The hijacking turns the new idea into merely a tactic to serve the old idea. Customer centricity is neutralized, subsumed into the competitive paradigm.

Some examples:

1. Is it just me, or has the Ritz Carlton recently stepped up its emphasis on employees using the phrase “my pleasure?” Other companies are copying it. If delivered without sincerity, it results in a hollow mockery of the intended customer focus. Delivered too often, even with sincerity, it risks appearing obsequious—an autonomic reaction, not an indication of customer focus, thus highlighting its use as a tactic, not a goal.

2. How about, “your business is very important to us…” It clearly isn’t, otherwise you’d hire someone to answer the phone instead of routinely kicking me to voicemail hell. Which means it’s another faux version of customer focus, using the hollow shell—the words, in this case—of customer centricity, but in service merely to cost-cutting. If you’re going to put me on hold, then at least have the decency to own the decision—don’t lie to me.

3. Or, “your opinion matters to us.” No it doesn’t. If it did, you’d do something more than a simple check-box card in my hotel room. If it actually did matter to you, the desk clerk would act like he or she cared when I made a suggestion. If it did, you’d use it for something more than employee ratings.

4. Or, "I do apologize for that, sir," when the thing being apologized for is either an objectionable corporate policy or a systems screwup, but in any case has nothing to do with the poor agent doing the apologizing.

The language of relationships—feelings, apologies, empathy—has been evident in business lately. It is ostensibly about personal connections, about taking responsibility, and about focusing on the needs and feelings of the customer.

That’s the theory. In practice, it’s often just more slick sloganeering. If a company really wanted to be customer centric, they’d apologize for mistakes they made, and own up to decisions they didn’t intend to change. Imagine hearing this from a company spokesperson:

"This is a result of the policies we follow; occasionally it severely inconveniences someone and it sounds like that’s what happened here. I can promise you I’ll make sure the company is aware of this result so we can work to reduce it in future—but to some extent, that’s the inevitable result of our chosen policy, and it’s intentional. I’m sorry that you’re caught in it, let me do what I can to resolve it for you right now."

That would at least be honest. Alternatively, one could change the policy in question. But for heaven’s sake, don’t lie to us and fake it.

Fake customer-centricity is like counterfeiting. Counterfeiting harms retailers, or wine merchants, or tech manufacturers, or software writers. Fake customer-centricity harms customers. It turns our commercial relationships into low-integrity lying.

We’ve got enough of that already. Insist on the real thing.

Here’s a video clip that says it all.