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Stupid Crazy Trust

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Sometimes I get annoyed. Usually, that means I’m thinking like an idiot. Sometimes, however, it produces useful ideas.

Lately I’m annoyed by the constant repetition of a myth about trust. You know this one: “Trust takes a long time to create, but only a moment to destroy.” There’s no need to name names here, but you can see examples of it here and here and here and here.

This time, my annoyance produced some good: I can now explain why that myth isn’t merely annoying, but positively harmful as well. Here goes.

The Truth.

Let’s start with the truth. Most human relationships, like most emotions, take roughly as long to get over as they took to develop. Marriages or friendships don’t end overnight. There may be a flash point, a straw that breaks the camel’s back. But we cut slack for people we trust. We don’t dump them abruptly.

If trust were lost in a minute, battered women wouldn’t stay with the men who beat them; things are a little more complicated than that.

If trust died quickly, the SEC would have investigated Bernie Madoff when Harry Markopolos first lodged charges against him. If trust died quickly, the steady drip drip drip of evidence at Penn State, Enron, Toyota, and Johnson & Johnson would have ended at the first drip.

Most examples of “trust lost quickly” turn out to be either just the last drip in a long series of drips or a delusion about trust’s existence in the first place. You don’t “violate the trust” of a subscriber to your email list by sending them a worthless referral. The relationship you have with a name on your email list may be many things, but “trust-based” is probably a stretch.

Trust formed quickly can be lost quickly. Trust formed at a shallow level can be lost at the same level; trust formed deeply, or over time, takes deeper violations, or a longer time, to be lost. The pattern looks more like a standard bell curve than a cliff.

But, you might say, so what? Why are you annoyed? Why is that harmful? 

The Harm

If you believe that trust can be lost in a moment, then you likely believe you must be cautious and careful about protecting it. You are likely to think about trust as a precious resource to be guarded against being tarnished. You are inclined to institute rules and procedures to protect it and to give cautionary lectures about the risk of losing trust.

Yet these are precisely the kinds of behavior that result in trust lost.

I don’t trust the man who talks with me while pointing a gun at me‬—partly because he looks threatening to me, but also because he clearly does not trust me.

Trust, at a personal level, is like love and hate: you tend to get back what you put out. You empower what you fear. Those afraid of getting burned are the most likely to get burned.

This totally works at a corporate level too. I remember vividly the convenience store chain that gave monthly lie detector tests to store managers to prevent theft—and then wondered why the theft kept on happening.

Trust is a Muscle

Thinking of trust as something you can lose in a minute makes you cautious and unlikely to take risks. But the absence of risk is what starves trust. There simply is no trust without risk—that’s why they call it trust.

If your people aren’t empowered, if they’re always afraid of being second-guessed, then they will always operate from fear and never take a risk—and as a result, will never be trusted.

Trust is a muscle—it atrophies without use. And the repetition of the mantra “trust can be lost in a moment” just tells people not to use it.

Turns out the stupidest, craziest trust is the trust you never engaged in because you were too afraid of losing it. The smartest trust is the trust you get by taking a risk.

Collaboration: Not Just an Internal Virtue

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We usually think of collaboration as a good thing. But we also usually think of it as something we do internally—in order to compete with the external world. This is a viewpoint which has proven harmful in the past.

The future of collaboration is not just internal, but external as well—with various stakeholders, particularly including customers and suppliers.

Old Collaboration: Us Against Them

As the Deputy Dean of Academic Affairs at Harvard Business School puts it, “Today, more than ever, business is a competitive endeavor. At the same time, management is a more collaborative endeavor.”  That’s the old view–collaboration as a management technique, practiced in service to a competitive-based strategy.

Jack Welch’s term “boundarylessness” captured this introverted form of extroversion perfectly:  it was boundarylessness, right up to the corporate boundary. At that point, it became us vs. them.

The Dangers of Limiting Collaboration to Internal Only

Google recently got slammed for its Buzz product introduction, which seemed blind to concerns about privacy.  The problem was not testing: Google routinely runs massive tests on new product introductions–but it does so internally. Had Google tried to collaborate with some non-Google folks, someone might have clued them in about the suspicious world outside the inner walls at Mountainview.

And that’s not a unique example. Toyota is currently paying the price for low levels of external collaboration—despite excellent levels of internal collaboration.

I remember vividly the first class on my first day of my first year at business school. It was a consumer marketing case, about introducing a new product. I and everyone in the class concluded it was a horrible idea; none of us could envision buying the product.

The joke was on us; the product was a huge success. The lesson? Never do market research on yourself.

Collaborating with your teammates is good for speed and efficiency. But external collaboration connects you with the world outside. Big stakes.

New Collaboration Reduces Risk by Going External

Conventional wisdom declares collaboration to be an internal management tactic. The collaborative capitalist view is that collaboration is no longer a tactic, but a strategy for more successfully engaging the outside world on terms other than solely competitive.
 

The Real Lesson of Toyota: Cultural Insensitivity?

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The obvious story about Toyota—in the US anyway–is their perceived huge loss of trust. Typical is this column yesterday by David Lazarus of the LA Times, titled Toyota: What’s so Hard About Doing the Right Thing? 

Suggests Lazarus:

“Toyota’s actions throughout this mess — the initial denials, the obfuscating, the gradual acknowledgment of safety issues — suggest that its priority first and foremost has been to cover its crankcase, not safeguard its customers.”

Well…not so fast.

Not Every Moral High Ground Looks the Same from All Vantage Points.

Take Laura Silsby, the head of the group accused of kidnapping children in Haiti. Here’s what CBS reports she said in front of the court: 

Silsby told the judge: "We were trying to do what’s best for the children."

When the judge asked, "Didn’t you know you were committing a crime?" Silsby quietly answered, "We are innocent."

Personally, I have very little doubt that Silsby sincerely believed what she said. More importantly, she appears to have believed that her beliefs would shared by the vast majority of the world’s population, including a Haitian court.

As it turns out—the courts in Haiti somehow saw morality differently, believing that when due process of Haitian law regarding separating families is the issue, there’s more at stake than bureaucracy.

Or take Scott Roeder, who pleaded innocent in Wichita Kansas to murdering George Tiller (an abortion doctor), because “Those children were in immediate danger if someone did not stop George Tiller…The babies were going to continue to die.” 

As it turns out, the Wichita jury took 37 minutes to view Roeder’s plea from a different viewpoint; one in which premeditated killing over a disagreement about a legal procedure constituted the crime of murder.

Toyota’s Behavior from the American Perspective

The LA Times article quoted at the outset of this post is quintessentially American. Toyota made mistakes, the narrative goes, then did the classic Watergate move, compounding the error by covering it up.

The American narrative continues.  No forthcoming comments. No transparency. Vague claims of intent to fix. Then, more bad news, dribbling it out. Even Toyota’s American dealers—behaving more like Americans than Toyota employees–bought the American narrative and withdrew advertising from ABC affiliates because they didn’t like the press coverage. 

Why did Toyota do this? According to the American narrative, the same reason as John Edwards, AIG, Merck, Enron, Lehman, and pick-your-scandal everyone else did: to line their pockets, take the money and run, fleece the average American–a quick-buck hustle.

And, in America, they’re generally right.

Except Toyota is a very Japanese company.

Toyota’s Behavior from the Japanese Perspective

I am no expert on Japanese culture. I’ve set foot there only once. I’ll gladly take corrections from those who know the culture better than I.

But here’s what I think.

The story in Japan is not one of greed, but of hubris. And not American hubris, but Japanese. 

From JapanToday we hear: 

“It’s a “terrible blow” for Toyota because its identity is so closely linked to quality and the company seemed slow to recognize the problems, said Kenneth Grossberg, a marketing professor at Waseda University who has lived in Japan for 16 years. 

In other words, they committed a cardinal Japanese sin: the sin of arrogance, by letting down their constant vigilance of quality. Greed? The story here is not greed; it’s something much worse in Japan—loss of face.  About the company image.  And about the national obsession–quality.  The Japanese are upset about Toyota too–just not in exactly the same way we are.

In a culture that not so many years ago considered failures like this a cause for major public self-humiliation, it is not surprising that mea culpas are taken very seriously. For one thing, when Americans don’t apologize quickly, we assume it’s because they’re legally at risk when they confess. The concepts are distinct in Japan–you can apologize without risking legal consequences.

This is not a simple analysis. Brooke Crothers, who knows more than I do, attributes it in part to another Japanese trait—a desire for denial. 

Whatever your view, it’s hard not to ascribe our own unconscious belief systems to others. 

Hard, but pretty important nonetheless.