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The Vocabulary of Trust on Twitter

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iStock Texting in meetingTrying to define the word “trust” is a bit like defining obscenity. As former Chief Justice Potter Stewart said about the latter, you can’t define it, but you know it when you see it.

My favorite example of this is, “I trust my dog with my life—but not with my ham sandwich.” It’s a joke we all get; but it does wreak havoc with a straightforward definition of the word.

To put it another way, the meaning of the word is contextual.  A dictionary is not a book of symbolic logic; it is an anthropological document. It tracks how real people in the real world use real words.  And the more contextual the word’s meaning, the more we have to rely on straightforward anthropology.

One of the real worlds of today is Twitter land. For about two months now, I have been tracking the use of the word "trust" as it is used in various conversations on twitter. It is interesting to see how the language used by real people and unconscious conversation tracks very neatly with the usages of "trust" identified previously in articles and blog posts on this website.

The Several Meanings of "Trust"

I have suggested elsewhere that we sometimes talk about trusting, and other times we talk about being trusted, or trustworthy. There are other times when we talk about trust per se, meaning the state that exists on both trusting and being trusted are present. Following are some examples of each (typos left in for authenticity).

Examples of trust meaning "trusting"

  • what i learn from @utterperfect : Never trust anyone a 100%. You’ll never know what the people around you are capable off.
  • Posted my favorite butternut squash ravioli recipe. Trust me, it’s worth the effort.
  • Better of with just friends with benefits. Bc I don’t trust no1 anymore!
  • @Antoniogreen Yeah I trust in God & I’m not scared to die, I’m just scared to die in pain you know.
  • damn. people suck. no wonder its hard for me to trust people. Now i can’t tell if there telling the truth or not.
  • i have trust issues
  • Preview: Luke 17:3-4; When I have forgiven I will trust ..
  • Have Rules But Trust People you can’t have a rule for every situation.

Examples of trust meaning “trustworthiness”

  • RT @amlibraries: Top 100 health websites you can trust
  • @craigbutcher @paulums never trust french hosting
  • @NICELOOKNINA girl never trust annnyone who’s nice to everyone.
  • @sydsouthworth The externals work great for storage just don’t trust it only. Use other media as well like DVDs
  • Some trust in silver and some in gold some in chariots and horses but ill put my trust in the LORD for in HIM is safety and security.
  • @Mister_Magister Did I or did I not make you tofu you actually liked? Always trust a foodie 😀
  • Never trust anybody who says ‘trust me.’ Except just this once, of course. – from Steel Beach
  • @BillyTheBrime Trust me, I’m an expert ma’am.
  • And it backs up my view that you should never trust the moral right;)
  • Ok, we’ve had booby-trapped shoes and undies. Which piece of clothing will imperil lives next? I don’t trust cufflinks.
  • "Man made alcohol, God mad marijuana, who do you trust?"

Examples of trust meaning “a state of trust”

  • Talk it out. Come to a compromise. Don’t just keep someone around and then cheat on them. You risk your reputation as a person. No trust.
  • RT @DIJONES82: In my world trust is more important than love.
  • Another thing lacking in the Black American relationship is communication which breeds trust
  • Sugar Mtns 7 brand tenets: Trust, Clarity, Experimental, Intelligent, Remarkable, Consistently Good, Full Flavored.
  • It takes years to earn trust, and just moments to break it.
  • Is trust as important as commitment in marriage? After all, marriage is a covenant, right?

What Meaning do Trust Measures Assume?

When you think about trust patterns or read statistics about trust, ask yourself: what meaning is being measured?

• Is it the trustworthiness of someone or some institution? (Typical question: how much do you trust banks to do the right thing?)
• Is it the ability of someone to trust? (Typical question: do you think people are generally trustworthy?)
• Is it the state of trust in general? (Typical question: Is this a high-trust environment around here?)

Are you measuring changes over time (longitudinal)? Or are you thinking of contrasting levels (used car dealers vs. lawyers vs. nurses)?

Patterns of Trust on Twitter

I have not yet systematically analyzed the data, but I can make a couple of generalizations.

  • The word "trust" gets used very frequently; at 11PM (US EST) on a weeknight, about 100 tweets every 7 minutes employ the English word “trust.”
  • On Twitter, as compared to business, the meaning “trusting” is probably more common, and the meaning “trustworthiness” is probably less common.
  • The most common usage is probably the imperative “trust me,” closely followed by the imperative “don’t trust ___.”
  • There is an emerging meaning: the word by itself, as in “it’ll all work out: trust,” or “keep the faith, baby: trust.” It has a combined sense of “trust me” and “don’t worry.”

 

Wall Street, We Have a (Simple) Problem

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Let’s keep it simple.

The first step toward dealing with a problem is admitting you have a problem.

I try to stay away from politics in this blog. But I know something about business, trust and society. And when issues of business trust arise, they need to be written about. 

The fact that some might view this as “political” is a deplorable bit of collateral damage brought about in great part by those who have abused business and trust in the first place.

So much has been written about the problem with our financial sector that it’s easy to become numbed. So let’s keep it very, very simple.

Does the financial sector “get it?” Never mind the suggestion of the President of the United States that they don’t. How about financial eminence grise Paul Volcker?

Here’s what Volcker had to say about excessive compensation at a high level bankers’ conference:

“Has there been one financial leader to say this is really excessive? Wake up, gentlemen. Your response, I can only say, has been inadequate.”

Translation: too many don’t get it. 

Again, let’s keep it simple. The financial sector has grown, grown and grown in recent years. First, some perspective on profit and compensation growth from the IMF’s former chief economist:

From 1973 to 1985, the financial sector never earned more than 16 percent of domestic corporate profits. In 1986, that figure reached 19 percent. In the 1990s, it oscillated between 21 percent and 30 percent, higher than it had ever been in the postwar period. This decade, it reached 41 percent. Pay rose just as dramatically. From 1948 to 1982, average compensation in the financial sector ranged between 99 percent and 108 percent of the average for all domestic private industries. From 1983, it shot upward, reaching 181 percent in 2007.

Then, some perspective on the financial sector as a percentage of GDP from Nobel-prize-winning economist Paul Krugman: 

Even during the “go-go years,” the bull market of the 1960s, finance and insurance together accounted for less than 4 percent of G.D.P. The relative unimportance of finance was reflected in the list of stocks making up the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which until 1982 contained not a single financial company…

On the eve of the current crisis, finance and insurance accounted for 8 percent of G.D.P., more than twice their share in the 1960s. By early last year, the Dow contained five financial companies — giants like A.I.G., Citigroup and Bank of America.

Some say these data don’t account for the relative importance and innovation created by the financial sector. 

Here’s what Paul Volcker had to say about such claims:

[Volcker] said that financial services in the United States had increased its share of value added from 2 per cent to 6.5 per cent, but he asked: “Is that a reflection of your financial innovation, or just a reflection of what you’re paid?”

[a clearly irritated Mr Volcker said that] the biggest innovation in the industry over the past 20 years had been the cash machine…“I wish someone would give me one shred of neutral evidence that financial innovation has led to economic growth — one shred of evidence.”

Let’s keep it simple. Forget the mind-numbing details of what Warren Buffet called “financial weapons of mass destruction.”  There are some simple facts we need to remember.

This is a legitimate social question: not just a business question, and surely not just a political question. The financial sector has gotten too big. It pays itself too much. There are plenty of fine people in the industry, and I’ve had the privilege of working with many; but on balance, perhaps not enough.

Too much of the sector is built and managed on the basis of financial returns only, and on the short-term rather than the long-term. It is not—on balance—an industry being run for the betterment of society. The social benefits of globalized, digitized, productized, market-driven structures have been overwhelmed by the social costs of illiquidity (aka credit freeze), risk protection (aka bailout), opportunity cost (aka our best and brightest designing nano-second trading models) and social misery (aka unemployment).

A critical sector of the economy has become–on balance–systemically untrustworthy, and therefore unworthy of being trusted. Sellers’ needs are vastly over-emphasized relative to customers’ needs. On balance, the sector has come to equate ethical behavior with the absence of legally prohibited activity, and to do so unconsciously.

Society has a right to demand that its business sector conduct itself in ways that are constructive for society as a whole, not just for shareholders and management. That right supersedes any “right” of corporate entities and their management to do what they want according to some gross misreading of Adam Smith. 

Let’s keep it simple. Wall Street, we have a (simple) problem.

January Carnival of Trust is Up

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The Carnival of Trust this month is ably hosted by Jon Ingham, world traveler HR capital expert who hosts the blog Social Advantage from his perch in the UK.  And Jon has produced a delightful Carnival for you.

Jon has done the heavy lifting for you, so you can read highly concentrated doses of the best (that is, from Jon’s perspective) of the last month’s postings broadly related to trust.  Jon’s perspective inevitably colors the choices, which is exactly what we want from Carnival of Trust hosts; his viewpoint is that of human relationships.

Some of the goodies he’s served up for you include:

  • The emerging Trust Economy;
  • Whether it’s ethical to tweet workshop content;
  • Should you give trust, or should others earn it;
  • Three easy steps to losing trust.

And more.  All with Jon’s trenchant commentary.

Go ahead, treat yourself to some fine reading at the Carnival of Trust.  It’ll lower your cholesterol. (Well, it’ll do your heart good anyway).

Thanks again to Jon Ingham for hosting.

 

 

Grounded Corporate Culture vs. Up In The Air Management

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Over the holiday weekend we gorged on movies; Sherlock Holmes, Broken Embraces, a few others. One that got decidedly mixed reviews was Up In the Air. Personally, I liked it. The New Yorker explains it very well.

But you don’t have to agree with me for us to use the metaphor. George Clooney plays a globe-trotting firer-for-hire; an outsider hired by management to terminate people at arm’s length. (Never mind such jobs basically don’t exist, this is Hollywood). 

On a dozen levels, the movie deals with the issue of intimacy in business. Firing people by proxy; quitting a job by texting; romance in the friendly skies—or is it romance? And throughout it all, can we tell the difference?

Intimacy in Business

Also over the weekend, I had a cuppa with a client, a partner at a large global professional services firm. Call him Ishmael.

We talked about his business and mine, mine consisting in part of selling to his. Like many large firms, his has cut back virtually 100% on internal travel. 

Ishmael: A global business of collegial professionals can exist for a year without mixing with your partners. Maybe even a little longer. But at some point it begins to exact a toll. We’ve been webinared to death.   Worse, we only have two-dimensional, sensory-deprived images of each other. 

There’s only so much you can do to maintain a connection without the physical, breathing presence of each other. Avatars and holograms and con-calls don’t do it. Cultures don’t live by cloud-computing alone. To make a firm, you’ve got to drink beer together, play golf together, smell each other, laugh and cry in the same room at the same time. 

Is that a real poncho, or is that a Sears poncho? (Frank Zappa)

Up in the Air Management

What I liked about the movie was that the Clooney character actually does have the ability to be real: he shows it in a scene where he cuts through the cynical hatred of a terminated employee (the talented J.K. Simmons) to jarringly put him back in touch with his youthful dreams. And yet Clooney’s character is so practiced in the Plastic Ways that he ultimately can’t recognize when he’s lost touch with that ability.

The best movies are metaphors for life. There’s fodder enough here to rail against the twittering, ADD-ridden, thumb-dancing toys that threaten to reduce our attention to a tiny screen. But that’s not all.

Those new technologies are also metaphors in addition to being virtual reality centers. They are metaphors for other forms of anti-intimacy management tools–blind auctions; outsourcing; management by process; modular design; over-use of legal agreements; online employment search.

There’s nothing wrong per se with any of these tools. But taken uncritically, and at too great a strength, you end up with Clooney in the skies, aiming at what you think is real, but which ends up being just a pale reflection.  

…like a Sale sign in the window; you go in, and find it is only the sign that is for sale. (Soren Kierkegaard)

And You Thought The Purpose of a Bank Was to Make Loans?

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I’m no economist or banker, so I occasionally labor under the delusion that banks are supposed to lend money to credit-worthy people. Of course, they diluted the definition of "credit-worthy" a few years back. That ruined their liquidity. Then the Feds stepped in with the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

Silly me, I had also thought TARP was partly aimed at restoring banks’ ability to lend money again.

Read the following (real) tale of woe from a qualified would-be borrower–let’s call her Jane–and ask yourself why Wells-Fargo would be so hesitant to lend.

For a clue, look to the end of Jane’s tale.
———

Jane’s Tale: If I Can’t Get a Mortgage, Who Can?

Last spring my sister and I decided to build an addition onto our vacation home in Northern Minnesota. Given today’s economic climate, we knew it wouldn’t be a cakewalk but we had no idea what a nightmare lay ahead.

Our family has owned lakefront property on Lake Superior since 1971. It’s prime vacation area with large million-dollar+ homes built on either side. Our parents deeded us the property 20 years ago, mortgage already paid off. After our mother died last year, we decided to build an addition. We hired an architect and a contractor with a long and credible reputation and a crew ready for work. We looked for a bank that would provide a construction loan for $250,000, for conversion to a mortgage when construction was completed. We went with Wells Fargo in Duluth. Their banker told us a loan was possible, but we’d need to open a business account first. My sister deposited $30,000.

Two weeks later, I was in the bank’s mortgage department armed with my loan application and identification; 2007 and 2008 tax returns; pay stubs; bank statements; property tax and home insurance records on this and my primary residence. He soon persuaded us to quit claim the LLC. I would become the sole applicant for the loan because I was an “ideal customer.”

Here’s my profile:

  • My income is in the top 10% of U.S. households; I’ve been a senior executive for ten years with an international NGO;
  • I own a car and home in the NYC area and paid off my mortgage in 2001;
  • I have one child in college and another who has graduated and is self-supporting;
  • I have two credit cards which I pay in full every month, my credit score is 775;
  • I have liquid assets worth more than the value of the loan; my retirement account is substantial but not lavish after the 2009 freefall;
  • The title search is clear and the appraisal of the lakefront property is $520,000.

The bank then required me to close the business account and open a personal account. I transferred the $30,000 and added $5,000 for good measure. I requested and got written permission for an “early start” on the construction because we needed to get the foundation poured before the Minnesota winter set in. For the next two months I endured slow torture at the hands of Wells Fargo and their big, bad “underwriter.” They peppered me with dozens of demands for information and ridiculous questions (Q:“Where did the $30,000 deposit come from?” A: “From the Wells Fargo business account you required me to open and then close.”). I was asked to fax my driver’s license four more times and to disclose the terms of liquidating my 403B.

When I was asked to explain why I made a late payment on my VISA bill in February of 2002 (7 ½ years ago!) I blew my top. For seven long weeks I was told that if I just met a few more conditions we could go to closing. These requests came from various Wells Fargo offices around the country – and were often redundant. When I asked to speak with the underwriter directly I was ignored.

Meanwhile, we were continuing to pay cash to our contractor so that our beautiful house could go up before winter. I reminded the banker that every delay in closing meant that I would be borrowing less money and they would earn less interest. Did they want to make a deal or not? We set a closing date of October 16. Ten days before, I had a conference call with the mortgage banker in Duluth and the Senior Relationship Manager in Minneapolis. I reminded them that I was flying out to Minnesota so they needed to tell me exactly what I should bring with me for the closing. The answer was “only your driver’s license.”

On October 15, hours before I was to board my flight for the scheduled closing, I was presented with several more conditions that had to be met (Q: “Could I explain the large deposits made into my Citibank account in the last month?” A: “You’ve seen my paystubs; that is my income.”) and then “we should be able to close in five days.” The banker’s e-mail said, “I imagine having been run through the gauntlet…that it is doubly frustrating to have to provide so much detail when you are clearly the kind of borrower any bank should love to have.”

At that point I realized I was never going to get a loan from the mortgage giant Wells Fargo, nor are they seeking ideal customers who pay their loans. Happily, our architect is talented and trustworthy and our contractor is honest and hard-working. Those business relationships have been highly professional and free of impediments. We can finance our second home without paying Wells Fargo $50,000 for the privilege of lending us money. But IF I CAN’T GET A MORTGAGE, WHO CAN?

No wonder we have a credit crisis in this country!

 

———

 

Wonder why Wells-Fargo was so unwilling to lend, and unwilling to talk about it? Here’s a clue.

It was announced a couple days ago that Wells Fargo bought its way out of TARP, including its restrictions on executive pay, etc. To get there, as I understand it, they had to restore their loan-to-capital ratio. One way to do that is raise more capital; another is to make fewer loans.

Draw your own conclusions, and share them here.

 

Customer Service Lessons from Ikea and US Air?

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IKEA Empowers Employees and Customers

I took my daughter to IKEA today to help her bring some furniture home to her apartment. As we went to the checkout line, there were three self-service lines, and only attended checkout line. We chose one of the self service lines, and checked out very quickly.

As we took our purchases out to the parking area, my daughter commented that it would have been fairly easy for someone to slip through without paying. This was not one of those stores where people scan your invoices and receipts. There were only a few people checking.

Yet as we left, one of the attendants followed us and said, “Wait, wait you forgot one of your purchases.” Sure enough, we had. So I guess they were watching well enough, and she smiled graciously as we thanked her.

Clearly IKEA did trust their customers to some extent, and it also seemed like they trusted their employees to pay attention and do the right thing. My daughter said the experience made her feel like IKEA trusted her, and was looking out for her best interests at the same time.

US Air Gives a Passenger a Really Big Christmas Gift

The week of December 14, I flew from New York to Cincinnati to Charlotte to Toronto to New York, most of it on US Air. On the leg from Cincinnati to Charlotte, I accidentally left my MacBook Air computer in the seat pocket in front of me on the airplane. (Note to Steve Jobs: can you make the MBA a little less convenient, please?) When I got to the hotel I figured out what happened.

I first called US Air’s central customer service, which was a horrible experience. It ended with the person I talked to saying I should talk to TSA. I said that was ridiculous, and got back on the phone to the local Charlotte airport. There I learned that nothing had been returned from the flight and the plane had left for Birmingham. (Second note to Steve Jobs: can you make the MBA a little more clunky and visible, please?)

I managed to get to US Air’s Birmingham baggage office—and suddenly my problems were over. I met Veronica. Who is your basic goddess of travelers.

Veronica immediately understood my problem and offered to solve it. She called the gate to make sure someone checked the minute the flight landed. As soon as the plane landed, she found the computer and called me. I was extremely relieved, and asked if she could send it back on the next plane.

“Gosh, we used to do that, but insurance and so forth nowadays,” she explained. I asked for permission to speak to her supervisor. “Oh sure,” Veronica said, “no problem; maybe she can help you!”

Lisa is what you’d expect from a goddess’s supervisor. She listened carefully to my story, and explained their policy. They were willing to send it via FedEx. I explained I was willing to absorb the risk of damage. (Third note to Steve Jobs: could you please make the MBA a little more breakable?) What I really didn’t want was to not have it for the next day in Charlotte, and have to suffer the risks of FedExing it to Toronto. (No offense to FedEx, my carrier of choice).

She weighed the data, and made a spot decision. By herself. She asked Veronica to pack it very carefully and get it shipped to me on the next flight back to Charlotte (the last flight).

Good call, Lisa.

I went back to the airport and bit my nails, until a package came down the baggage chute. Carefully wrapped, it had a handwritten note in big letters on the outside: Merry Christmas Mr. Green!

US Air may not be perfect, but they got three things perfectly right. They hired Veronica. They hired Lisa. And they gave both of them the power to make smart decisions, on their own, when it came to customers.

Trust and Collaborative Capitalism

Shout out to both companies. Trust your employees to trust your customers. Trust begets trust, and everyone benefits.

This is collaborative capitalism, folks. This is not your father’s zero-sum game. This works.

Buyers are Liars. Wait, What?

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Want to do an interesting online search? Fire up your favorite browser and go looking for “Buyers are Liars.”

It’s a common phrase in several industries—car sales and real estate, for example. In each of those industries, you can find two related-but-different versions of that phrase.

In version one, it is usually spoken by a resentful salesperson, as in, “Can you believe that guy? He told me he would be right back within the hour, but, well, you know—they walk out the door, they’re gone. Buyers are liars.”

In version two, a more seasoned seller, often in conversation with a young trainee, speaks it. It goes, “If they say they want a cul de sac, brick construction, east-facing kitchen—don’t believe it. Maybe one of those is key—the others they’ll compromise on, because you know, buyers are liars. You have to find out what they really want, they don’t know themselves. They don’t mean to lie; that’s just how they think.”

Both views are right. And both are reflections of businesses in which the seller holds a lot of power by virtue of expertise and a potentially menacing and arcane sales process. Not surprisingly, buyers respond with their own attempt to control the situation—withholding or otherwise manipulating the truth.

This is precisely the dynamic I’ve observed over the years in watching clients buy professional services. Clients have not been to buyers’ school. They don’t know what to ask, but are afraid of being flim-flammed. So they resort to what feels low-risk—asking the seller to recite their qualifications and testimonials.

The weaker salespeople take the potential client at face value, and actually believe they want to hear the selling firm’s resumes and past client history. Then follows the sleep-inducing recitation and powerpoint avalanche.

Do client buyers lie? Yes, and mainly it’s the services firms’ fault. The trick is to get to that place of mutual admission that there’s something each can bring to the party.

What about a very different industry?

A University of Texas study explores the “buyers are liars” theme in the market for entrepreneurial firms, often by private equity buyers. As the study’s author, Melissa Graebner, puts it:

… buyers were not only less trusting than sellers, they were more likely to be dishonest. Beyond price bluffing, several buyers engaged in what Graebner calls "material deception" with regard to their plans for post-integration "layoffs, changes in strategic direction or diminished roles for senior managers."

Sellers—generally smaller firms owned by the person who created them—appeared far more trusting of suitors. Little surprise, perhaps, given the passionate, conquering nature of entrepreneurs: "Me big geek," one seller told Graebner. "I’m a technologist. I want to build something that I want everyone to use. I want my ego boost! I’m not here for a quick buck, I’m here to do my big thing."

Another reason for the trust gap between buyers and sellers, notes Graebner, is the perceived transfer of power. "In the course of an acquisition, sellers lose power while buyers gain power," she says. "Given their prospects of heightened power, buyers viewed a seller’s trustworthiness as nonessential."

In car and real estate sales, I would say the seller has most of the power, and customers lie out of fear, recognizing that fact.

In professional services, it is the clients/buyers who often hold more power, yet don’t know it; so they also act from fear—with a result that is often harmful to both parties. The advertising industry may be an extreme example lately.

In Graebner’s study, I think the buyer has the most power again; but here the ego weakness is on the part of the seller, not the buyer. And it’s not fear that’s afoot, it’s a desire for ego stroking.

Sellers want to believe they can trust the buyer. And so many buyers, who truly do have the power, choose to lie.

Are buyers liars? Yes, but as a current movie says: it’s complicated.

A Better New Year’s Resolution

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I wrote a good blog post at this time three years ago, and haven’t improved on it yet. Here it is again.
Happy New Year.

—————–

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

It doesn’t have to be that way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Second, happy people do better. This has some verification in science, and it’s a common point of view in religion and psychology—and in common sense.
people who are slightly optimistic do better in life. People who are happy are more attractive to other people. In a very real sense, you empower what you fear—and attract what you put out.

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

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

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

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

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

Ethics and Trust: Interview with Dr. Robert Hoyk

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A few months ago I received a publicist’s offer to review a book. I usually take a quick look, but I almost always say no. This case was different.

The book is The Ethical Executive: Becoming Aware of the Root Causes of Unethical Behavior, by Dr. Robert Hoyk and Paul Hersey, and the title was good enough for me to take the review copy.

What grabbed me was their idea that ethics is usually considered a philosophical issue, but the management application of ethics is largely a matter of psychology. The Ethical Executive lists 45 psychological Traps that drive people to behave unethically.

Following is an interview with author Dr. Robert Hoyk:

CHG: First, you have three categories of Traps—Primary, Defensive, and Personality. Can you explain them?

RH: Primary Traps directly drive people to behave unethically. These are the main traps that pull us in, that provoke us or trick us into illegal or unethical transgression.
An example of a Primary Trap is Power. The more the powerholder uses his power, the more he attributes the successes of his employees to his own leadership (“My orders and influence caused the workers to perform effectively”); Over time, the more the powerholder attributes the success of his employees to his own leadership, the more he begins to devalue his employees. (“It was my success! Not theirs! They were just following orders.”)

Defensive Traps are attempts to find easy ways to reverse course after a transgression has already been committed. They are reactions to two internal stimuli: guilt and shame. Guilt and especially shame are very painful emotions. They call into question the positive view we have of ourselves.
Defensive Traps are insidious because they annihilate or at least minimize √ our guilt and shame. They help us deny our transgressions, thus setting us up for repeated unethical behavior.

An example of a Defensive Trap is Advantageous Comparison. Advantageous Comparison allows the individual who has committed an unethical transgression to lessen his guilt by comparing what he has done to something worse. For example, “Damaging some property is no big deal when you consider that others are beating people up.”
Personality Traps are personal traits that can make us more vulnerable to wrongdoing.

An example is Social Dominance Orientation (SDO). SDO is a trait that delineates one’s “preference for inequality among social groups.” It is the wish that the groups and organizations you belong to (business teams, corporation, social class, gender, ethnicity, country, and so on) be “superior” and “dominate.” SDO can be measured by a questionnaire that has been developed by Felicia Pratto and her colleagues at Stanford University.

CHG: What makes your approach to ethics different from others? What does this psychological approach reveal that other approaches might not?

RH: Most approaches to ethics are philosophical. Philosophical ethics is important because it tells us what the right action is given different situations. But there’s a problem. Even if we know what the right thing to do is, we often don’t do it. Why? We often fall prey to psychological traps. Morality will improve to a great extent when ethics is integrated with psychology. Ethics will continue its crucial job of advising us what the right behavior is and psychology will motivate us to do the right thing and help us stop our transgressions.

CHG: In philosophy, this is what’s called the problem of incontinence: how to explain knowing the right thing to do, yet not doing it.

RH: The Ethical Executive places a major focus on the root causes of unethical behavior—psychological dynamics. It inaugurates a new priority in the field that will lead to a clearer vista and fresh solutions.

CHG: I’m not sure I agree with the word ‘cause’ here; but I surely agree it helps drive practical actions.

RH: In that vein, here’s a quote from author Anthony Parinello:

"This book will not teach you how to be ethical, it will educate you to recognize the day-to-day ethical traps that we all face, analyze them and give the practical, usable information you need to respond in a way that supports good intention, fair decisions, and abundant wealth.”

CHG: Your book came out in September 2008, before the latest flood of unethical behavior, largely in the financial sector. If you were to rewrite the book with this most recent data, what primary patterns would we see revealed?

RH: The 45 traps in The Ethical Executive are universal and timeless. We might have used different examples, but the traps would be the same. Having said that, we believe there are still more traps to discover.

Type A Personality may be such a trap. A Type A Personality is “characterized by a continuously harrying sense of time urgency.” This trait activates Trap 15: Time Pressure. People who are running a hundred miles per hour take short cuts when it comes to taking the time to make good ethical decisions and even to be aware that there might be a potential ethical dilemma.

CHG: How can executives and employees protect their organizations and themselves from these traps?

RH: First, know the 45 traps. Voyagers who know the location of quicksand navigate around it. When we clearly identify danger, we can prepare for it and avoid it.
Second, hire a psychologist to be part of the ethics and compliance team. Many of the traps incite powerful emotions that in turn pull victims toward wrongdoing. In general, emotions provoked by traps are: fear, anxiety, distress, shame, anger and sadness. Emotions this strong can bring us all to our knees. Moreover, be wary, we all have the capacity to shut down our emotions. If we don’t feel anything, it doesn’t always mean our emotions are gone. A psychologist can assist executives and employees deal with their intense emotions.

CHG: What does all this have to do with trust?

RH: In general, an ethical behavior is an action that engenders trust. It is a behavior that, as much as possible, creates non-zero-sum situations.
These two terms, non-zero-sum and zero-sum are taken from game theory. In zero-sum situations, the outcomes of those involved are “inversely related.” One person’s benefit “is the other’s loss.” In competitive sports, when one football team wins the other loses.

CHG: Ethical relationships are inherently relational; Robinson Crusoe had no need of ethics, at least before Friday.

RH: In non-zero-sum situations, one group’s win doesn’t have to be a misfortune for the other. The more that the needs of all parties are identical, the more you have a non-zero-sum situation. When the Apollo astronauts were marooned in space in 1970, their needs completely overlapped. The results of their actions to get back home would be either uniformly good or bad for all three of them.

Overall, ethical actions drive non-zero-sum interactions, which create more shared benefit and mutual trust.

CHG: And overall, greater economic benefit as well.  Dr. Hoyk, thanks very much for taking the time to share your thinking with us.
 

Are You a Trusted Twitterer?

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Measuring instrumentThose of you who love new social media and are measurement mavens, this blog’s for you.

Ever wonder how you’re doing on Twitter? Of course, you can’t miss the “followers” count at the top of your and everyone else’s twitter page. But, as you tell your fellow-twitterers, it’s not about the numbers. (Not that you’d turn down a doubling of your followership, of course…)

The urge to emulate former New York Mayor Ed Koch runs deep: “How’m I doin’?”

Well, courtesy of the Edelman PR agency  you can now measure your, well, your Tweetlevel. An interesting choice of words, because, well it’s hard to say just what’s being measured.

Measuring TweetLevel

Mechanically, you get a blended score of four attributes: Influence, Popularity, Engagement, and Trust. You can also get not only your own score, but the score of anyone else as well.

They tell you exactly how they compute each factor, and the total Tweetlevel. They also let you look under the hood, and and invite users to help improve the survey.

So let’s start by giving props. I’m no psychographic or statistics expert, but I’ve seen a few surveys, and this looks good. Note too that Edelman is perhaps the world’s leader in commercial trust measurement, authoring the Edelman Trust Barometer  for a decade now. CEO Richard Edelman builds conferences and speaking engagements around it. There are questions about any measurement of trust, but these guys are pros at doing trust surveys. It is a solid piece of work, and at the very least will raise good discussion questions.

Now for the fun.

Measuring Trust

Somebody hands you a ruler, the first thing you do is measure yourself. I clocked in at a TweetLevel of 43 (on a scale of 100). Higher than some, lower than others.

This blog is about trust, so that’s the one component on which I focused. My trust score was 39.9.

Now, just because I write about trust doesn’t mean I’m trusted. Oprah beats me. Her trust score is 64.5. OK, I can get with that.

Yet Oprah is surpassed by–Britney Spears! Spears sports a trust score of 68.7 Riddle me that one!

Now hold on to your hats; clocking in at third place, with a trust score of 95.7 is—Perez Hilton!  Of course. I should’ve seen it coming.

And hold on, in second place is—wait for it—John Mayer!  (In fairness, the NYTimes is number 5).

Why Measurement Mania is Death on Trust

It’s easy to lampoon surveys like this, but that’s only partly fair. The metrics for trust rely heavily on retweets, and on “via’s” (think of them as retweet derivatives, if you’re financially inclined). That’s not so crazy: number of citations is a decent metric for being ‘trusted’ in academia, for example.

I’ve written before  about measurement mania, the tendency in business these days to literally define management in terms of measurement (e.g. the silly phrase “if you can’t measure it you can’t manage it”). And I’ve written about the hazards of measuring trust in particular. 

The biggest problem comes not in the measurement, but in the subject matter.  So it is with trust. In the TweetLevel tool, trust is largely a function of how many people cite you. That’s perfectly reasonable. People definitely hang on Perez Hilton’s words a lot more than on mine.

But it does beg a huge trust question: trust Perez Hilton to do what? To say what? To behave how?  What is it that we trust about John Mayer–and is it the same thing as for which we’re trusting Oprah?

I trust my dog with my life–but not my ham sandwich. I trust Perez Hilton to tell me the straight poop in Hollywood–but not to show my daughter a night on the town. What is the object, the referent point, of the trust being measured?

Comparing trust metrics without defining the trust object is like comparing love metrics between a monastery and a brothel. By a perfectly obvious definition, the brothel gets a whole lotta lovin’ more than does the monastery.

In a sense, that’s right. And in another, ridiculous. Do we say a man with 5 marriages is ‘more loved’ than a man with one?  Is a parent with 5 kids more loved than a parent with one?  What is it that we’re measuring by using such metrics?

At this point, the numbers inevitably end up kind of looking like a popularity contest. There seems to be no referent point beyond the counting of incidents. Quality is overwhelmed by an onslaught of quantity. TweetLevel’s advice to increase trust scores is to get people to retweet you more. If everyone took this advice, Twitter would drown in derivative re-tweets. We’ve seen that movie before, on Wall Street.  It ends badly. 

On twitter, the mania to measure drives more empty-calorie retweets, which decreases original content, which ends in more retweet inflation as people try to game the game. 

It’s not that trust is ineffable, it’s just that it’s so contextual. Trust is a bit like obscenity; we know it when we see it, but that doesn’t mean we can easily define it, much less measure it. This is tail wagging the dog stuff.  The measurement system has a bad feedback loop to the content system; the mania for measurement ends up destroying the content it purports to measure.

Do You Want Meaning?  Or Measurement?

We can have meaning, or we can have precision. This is exactly the case in sub-atomic physics, where (as per Heisenberg) the act of measurement itself alters the thing being measured. It’s a perfect metaphor.

• You can say that you trust Perez Hilton to dish dirt, and Oprah to get real with you
• Or, you can say that Perez Hilton is 48.3% more trusted than Oprah
• But you can’t say one without rendering the other silly.

In accounting, there’s an age-old debate about how to define ‘profit.’ My finance prof Pearson Hunt said it the best: “Profit is–the bottom line of the income statement.” In other words: give it up; there is no one answer.

All you metrics mavens out there: when you get into the soft stuff, ask yourself: what is it you’re measuring? Is it the thing itself? Or is it some reflection of metrics in an infinite mirror?