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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.

Win a Free Copy of The Trusted Advisor Fieldbook Redux

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We’re excited about the early success of The Trusted Advisor Fieldbook: A Comprehensive Toolkit for Leading with Trust. It’s gotten a #4 ranking on The Washington Post Book World paperback bestseller list, a five-star Amazon review, and a growing list of features and media mentions.

Find out what all the hoopla is about―reply by Friday, December 2, 2011 midnight EST to win your free autographed copy of the book. Details below.

And the Winner Is…

Last month we ran a contest inviting readers to tell us about your favorite Trust Tip based on the daily countdown of #TrustTips on Twitter (144 in total from the time we started till October 31, the day The Trusted Advisor Fieldbook was officially released). We listed a few of our favorites, then turned it over to you to share yours.

The lucky winner is Dawna Houston, who gets a copy of the new book autographed by both of us, as well as this opportunity to be singled out on our site (also known as “eternal fame”).

Dawna’s favorite Trust Tip was #TrustTip 8: Trust enhances innovation: it allows people of different views to convert conflict into collaboration.

Dawna observed, “I have watched fear and anxiety absolutely shut down creativity, both personally and professionally; this tip is a great reminder that when we cultivate trust, our minds naturally open and our awareness expands.” Well said, Dawna. Congrats!

Are You Feeling Lucky?

You’ve got another chance to win. Simply take a look through the free download of chapter 1 and tell us how much money Charlie gave the taxi driver. If you get it right, you’ll be entered in the drawing. Send your answer in an email by Friday, December 2, 2011 midnight EST.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Meet Anthony Iannarino: Pragmatic, Insightful, Focused. (He also loves our book.)

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Anthony Iannarino, creator of The Sales Blog, recently reviewed our new book, The Trusted Advisor Fieldbook: A Comprehensive Toolkit for Leading with Trust. Anthony is a thoughtful subject matter expert on what he calls “the new art of sales and sales management.” We’re pleased to introduce Anthony to you, if you haven’t met him already.

Adventures in Selling

Once again proving that my resistance to Twitter is often misguided, Charlie and Anthony first “met” in the Twittersphere, and when I joined the party Charlie suggested I follow Anthony. It’s not the first time Charlie gave me good advice.

Anthony’s blog posts are pragmatic, insightful, and focused. He writes daily on adventures in sales and selling, sales management, the sales process, and what it takes to succeed. But what really resonates for me about Anthony’s posts is the drum he beats about the underlying belief system that leads to success in sales. Some of my favorites include:

When Anthony’s not blogging, he’s juggling myriad roles: President and Chief Sales officer for SOLUTIONS Staffing, a best-in-class regional staffing service based in Columbus, Ohio;  Managing Director of B2B Sales Coach & Consultancy, a boutique sales coaching and consulting company where he works to help salespeople and sales organizations improve and reach their full potential; and father of a thirteen-year-old boy and twin eleven-year-old girls. He has plenty to keep him occupied and we appreciate the time he took to read our book.

His review of the book, by the way, is Classic Anthony: pointed and thorough. Read it for yourself and find out what chapters he recommends zeroing in on. And don’t forget to turn to page 205 when you get your copy to read Anthony’s story about when to walk away.

Follow Anthony on Twitter, connect to him on LinkedIn, or friend him on Facebook.

Three Star Leadership

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Charlie and I were recently interviewed by Wally Bock of Three Star Leadership Enterprises on the subject of trust and leadership. He wanted to know what bosses in general can take away from our new book, The Trusted Advisor Fieldbook: A Comprehensive Toolkit for Leading with Trust.

From the Front Lines

Wally and I met via Twitter—he was a distinctive and caring voice in the crowd when I first joined the fray. Wally is a coach, consultant, and popular speaker to audiences in North America and elsewhere. He focuses on front-line leadership, and brings to his work all that he indelibly learned as a Sergeant in the United States Marine Corps—first and foremost that a leader’s job has two parts: accomplish the mission and care for your people.

Wally’s latest book, Ruthless Focus, features companies that have been successful for years by training their sights on a single, simple, core strategy. Wally also created the Working Supervisor’s Support Kit, among other resources. He’s committed to providing day-to-day practical advice on how to be a great boss.

Wally blogs thoughtfully and regularly on the subject of leadership at all levels in his Three Star Leadership blog. His aim: to give you insight, information, and pointers to resources to do a better job and live a better life. Example blog posts include:

Q & A

Wally asked us provocative and wide-ranging questions. He wanted to know:

  • How is The Trusted Advisor Fieldbook different from the original The Trusted Advisor?
  • What, exactly, makes this a “fieldbook”?
  • What can a boss take away from here, regardless of the level where they find themselves on the org chart?
  • In addition to the things any boss will get, is there something for each of the following:
    • A first line boss such as a police sergeant, call center boss, utility company crew chief or sales manager?
    • A middle manager, probably with a technical specialty such as accounting, marketing, or logistics?
    • A general manager in any size organization?
    • What is the single most important take-away from the Fieldbook?

Check out Wally’s blog post today to find out how we answered.

Connect with Wally on LinkedIn and Twitter.

While We’re in Book Promotion Mode…

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In case you hadn’t noticed, we’re now in heavy book promotion mode. The Trusted Advisor Fieldbook has recently published and we want the world to know about it.

What We’ll Be Talking About

We’ll be posting about media mentions. We’ll be posting about our posts that appear as guest blogs at other sites. We’ll be posting interviews with other authors and bloggers, live and recorded. And we’ll provide links to archived interviews, audio and text.

We hope you’ll share our enthusiasm. We’re excited, of course, and want to get it into as many hands as possible. We believe in our message and we believe that this book is a great tool that will help people gain and master trust.

Trust is more important than ever right now and we want to help people be net drivers for increased in trust in the business world and beyond.

Why We’re Saying This

We want to provide value in our blog posts, and know that event promotion per se isn’t necessarily of interest to you. We hope to keep it interesting by focusing on others; meantime, you can help promote the trust theme.

Because here’s the bottom line. We suffer these days not from too much trust, but from too little – in our politics, our institutions, our businesses, and our lives. We need to do two things better:

  • Be more trustworthy
  • Be more willing to trust others.

The better we get at these two tasks, the easier and better things get done. And getting things done is good for the economy.

And getting better at trusting and being trusted is good for the soul and for the body politic.

A Certified Trusted Traveler

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As of October 23, 2011, I have been declared by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection to be a “Trusted Traveler” through their Global Entry program. Let’s examine what the CBP means by “trusted.”

The Experience

If you fly internationally, you may have seen the “Global Entry” line or kiosk off to the side as you approach passport control. The line looks shorter―that’s the appeal of the program.

And it is shorter―an attractive proposition after a transatlantic or transpacific flight, or even one from Canada. The online application process is heavy-handed and slow, and you have to actually schedule an interview either at a federal office or an airport.

Oddly, the experience reminds me of dealing with JPMorganChase; very nice people, but you have to navigate through frustrating processes and systems to get to them.

But now that I’m “trusted”―what does that mean?

Customs and the Trust Equation

In the video they show you at the interview, several points are made. They welcome you as “low-risk,” though they also make a point of saying that continued membership is subject to good behavior, and that, in turn, is subject to occasional random audit. Sort of like Reagan’s “trust but verify,” I think.

The CBP is obviously trying to certify my trustworthiness, not my propensity to trust others. This is precisely what the Trust Equation was meant to do―to define, quantify, and evaluate the level of trustworthiness of an individual. So, let’s use it to examine what the CBP means by trusted traveler.

As far as I can tell, they use four critical elements in granting status. They demand to see a passport (I have no idea what scrutiny it’s given) and of course require it on entry; they take fingerprints and use them to verify on entry; on entry they match up travel plans with airline records; and they take a photo.

It seems to me the CBP is looking to establish two things: first, that I am who I say I am, both at the time of application and at subsequent times of entry; and second, that who I am is someone who does not currently present any security risk to the country.

Whereas the Trust Equation identifies four elements: credibility, reliability, intimacy, and self-orientation, the CBP Trusted Traveler Program focuses entirely on the first two attributes: credibility and reliability.

First, the various cross-checks (passport, fingerprints, travel plans, photo ID) are attempts to establish an ongoing identity. They all assess the truthfulness of my assertion that I am Charles H. Green, an individual with a particular history.

Second, the process certifies my reliability as a citizen in the past. It doesn’t extrapolate my past reliability into the future, i.e. as I prove further reliability the checks don’t get more beneficial or less onerous. It’s a one-step, one-off promotion.

And I think that’s it. It doesn’t have a thing to do with intimacy or low self-orientation. There’s no room in it for me to plead for leniency or for the government to be focused on my particular needs―nor the other way around. Which is for the most part as it should be.

The Benefits―and Shortfalls―of Trusted Travelers

The Trusted Traveler Program is a straightforward, mutually beneficial way of expediting some processing within an enormously expensive mass exercise in distrust. In a country obsessively reluctant to be seen as “profiling,” this approach is at least a step toward socially acceptable differential risk-taking—which is what trusting is about, after all.

This sort of trust—exclusively based on certification, credibility, and reliability—has an important place in society. The privacy-niks will always police the boundaries of certification in service to another form of trust—the trust that we can live free of Big Brother—but this trust lets us use things like credit cards, online payment systems, even currency. We absolutely need it.

But it is a narrow form of trust nonetheless. Trust-as-certified-identity can be used for bad ends as well. By itself, it doesn’t add to the richness of the human condition. It is a necessary, not a sufficient, condition for the living of life.

For trust to affect quality of life, we need those other trust elements—the security that permits intimacies and the ability to show other-orientation.

Meanwhile, you can trust that I’ll move more freely about the airports.

Real People, Real Trust: What Trust-based Strategy Consulting Looks, Feels, and Sounds Like

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Janet Andrews is a senior-level consultant at SRA’s Touchstone Consulting Group, a strategy and management-consulting firm. Janet spends her days running from one U.S. federal government building to the next, working with executives on issues of national interest. Discover Janet’s six tips for building trust-based relationships while getting the job done.

A Matter of Focus

“Janet’s reputation can be described as polished, thoughtful, and methodical,” says Jen Vanmeter, a colleague of Janet’s who teaches Trusted Advisor programs in-house and who co-wrote this blog. “She’s known for her smarts, her work ethic, and her integrity—she does exactly what she says she’ll do, when she says she’ll do it.” Jen continues, “She’s incredibly busy, and yet she takes time to pay attention. Even in a quick hallway chat, she’s focused on you, not the meeting she’s dashing off to.”

Jen and Janet spoke at length about how to build trust-based relationships in the midst of demanding and high-stakes projects. Here are Janet’s six maxims for client relationships that really work.

1.     Know Yourself; Know Others Even Better

When Janet thinks about building trust in business relationships, she makes it a point to step back and think what is most important for the person she’s talking to.

“If you have a client who leads with social connection, then that’s where you need to put your foot out first. If someone is results-oriented, they might not want to chat—they want to know what we did for them today. This colors how I position things; it helps me think, ‘How do I start off that conversation?’ That awareness of my own style and preferences helps me see that what I want to lead with maybe isn’t what will work best for them.”

2.     Remember It’s Their Truth, Not Yours

“Sometimes your version of what is right isn’t right for your client,” Janet says. “When I want my clients to do the right thing according to me, rather than the right thing according to their reality, I can easily become frustrated and therefore less effective.

“When I view their world with a lens of objectivity and put aside judgment of ‘that choice is good or bad,’ then I can walk into conversations with a more open mind. And I’ve noticed that clients respond in kind. When I remember they’re the ones that are living it, not me, then I focus on doing my best to advise them. Yes, I’m trying to sway them, but I keep in mind the decisions and choices that come out of it are theirs to own.

“Am I disappointed sometimes? Of course. But I keep reminding myself that whatever conclusion they come to, it is their truth. It’s my job to give them my best thinking. Pushing them on something they don’t want—or don’t want yet—is going to break trust, not build it, no matter how ‘right’ I think I am.”

3.     Focus on the Dialogue, not the Difficult

While Janet acknowledges that there are always difficult conversations to be had in any business relationship, she says they don’t have to be personally difficult.

“Earlier in my career, I might have taken more of a defensive posture with clients whose style can be aggressive or combative. Now, I see a tense conversation as less of a conflict, and more of a dialogue. And when I feel less tense, my clients seem to also.”

4.     Bravely Go First

“If there’s an elephant in the room that no one wants to bring up, I take a deep breath and bravely go first—once I’ve put aside my own judgments. If you can somehow frame the elephant by thinking about the other person’s motives, viewpoint, and how they like to lead, it can bring down their barriers to listening, so a dialogue—not a stand-off—can ensue.”

5.     Slow Down and Listen

Janet emphasizes the importance of listening, which can be challenging in the fast-paced world of strategy consulting. “Learning to be less focused on dictating how the play is going to end, and more focused on listening along the way, has been a real shift for me in my career.

“I remember once we were working on a key deliverable for a client. We’d been back and forth a couple of times on drafts. The client was mad at our team for not taking her comments seriously enough, and the team was frustrated because they thought she was being difficult. All it took was a real conversation and some patience to break the logjam.  Slowing down to really listen made me realize that we were all arguing the same point. When I acknowledged that, she agreed and we were able to move on.”

6.     Don’t Sweat It When You Don’t Click

 “Not all my clients consider me their trusted advisor. That used to worry me—of course I want everyone to like me. Now I recognize that sometimes it’s not going to click. So part of being a trusted advisor is being self-aware enough to recognize when it’s time to pass that relationship off to someone else who might be better suited for the relationship.”

Janet’s self-knowledge, her commitment to continuous improvement, and her willingness to focus on relationships as well as results clearly make a difference—for her colleagues as well as her clients.

Connect with Janet on LinkedIn.

——–

The Real People, Real Trust series offers an insider view into the challenges, successes, and make-it-or-break-it moments of people from all corners of the world who are leading with trust. Check out our prior posts: read about Chip Grizzard, a CEO You Should Know; Ralph Catillo: How One Account Executive Stands Apart;  Anna Dutton: A Fresh Perspective on Sales Operations; and Heber Sambucetti: A Learning Consultant’s Approach to Leadership.

StoryTime: When to Walk Away

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Our Story Time series brings you real, personal examples from business life that shed light on specific ways to lead with trust. Our last story told of an unexpected way to recover lost trust. Today’s anecdote zeroes in on the importance of personal integrity.

A New Anthology

When it comes to trust-building, stories are a powerful tool for both learning and change. Our upcoming book, The Trusted Advisor Fieldbook: A Comprehensive Toolkit for Leading with Trust (Wiley, October 31 2011), contains a multitude of stories. Told by and about people we know, these stories illustrate the fundamental attitudes, truths, and principles of trustworthiness.

Today’s story is excerpted from our chapter on dealing with untrustworthy people. It vividly demonstrates the value of being willing to walk away from a deal any time, and the paradoxical outcome that often follows.

From the Front Lines: Walking Away from the Table

Anthony Iannarino, President and CEO of SOLUTIONS Staffing in Columbus, Ohio, tells about facing an accusation from a client.

“After going through two long Request for Proposal processes, I was finally presenting to the 14-person buying team for a dream client. One panel member I knew to be hostile asked a critical question. I knew he wouldn’t like my answer, but I was truthful. He voted No—but I still won the job.

“At the contract signing, the ‘No Vote’ person read the contract and said: ‘I see here you have failed to meet the commitment you made to us in your presentation.’

“I replied: ‘I am sorry for any confusion, but I was very clear that I couldn’t provide that service. I told you that doing so would destroy our ability to provide you with the whole package we proposed, including the price.’

“The No Vote said: ‘You lied. You would have said anything in there just to get our business.’

“I got up and said: ‘Then I am afraid I can’t sign this contract. If you believe I lied to get your business, then I cannot take your business. I have never lied to get any business.’ And I got up to walk out.

“At this point the main buyer intervened. He contradicted the ‘No Vote’ and upheld my account of the presentation. The contract was signed.”

 It was Anthony’s willingness to put integrity ahead of the sale that, paradoxically, made the sale.

—S. Anthony Iannarino (President and Chief Sales Officer, SOLUTIONS Staffing)

Are you, like Anthony, willing to walk the talk—even if it means walking out the door?

+++++++++++++

Connect with Anthony on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, or his blog.

Read more stories about trust:

When Failure is an Option–and an Opportunity

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“Park the car,” the officer said to my 17 year old son who was taking his driving test.  He had put the car in drive and was about to make a left turn out of the parking space as the officer instructed.  He’d gone all of about 2 feet.  But he did not look to the right, an offense that will require retesting.

I’d practiced with my son the day before.  He is a good driver.  Obeys the rules of the road religiously.  Always goes the speed limit.  Stops completely at stop signs and for pedestrians.  Signals before turning.  I was sure he would get his license on his first try.

No Need for Blame or Shame

Was he upset?  His answer was a clear “no.”  He wasn’t embarrassed either.  “It just is,” he said.

What he didn’t do:

  • Make excuses or try to justify what happened
  • Blame the officer, me, my wife or even himself
  • Get angry

What he did do:

  • Respected the officer for calling him on the mistake
  • Resolved to pay more attention
  • Accepted the fact that he would have to retake the test and looked on the bright side — he would get to drive more for additional practice

Lessons Learned From a Failed Driving Test

We broadened our discussion about what could be learned from his experience:

  • Rules for driving are important.

He came up with that one.  If we did not follow those rules, the roads would be chaos and dangerous.  To me, that sounds a lot like reliability, a Trust Equation component.  Knowing that people stop for red lights and stop signs creates some degree of reliability.

  • Civilized society requires rules.

He mentioned that we need rules to survive as a society, so we know what is expected of us and what to expect.  Again, reliability on a more global, rather than individual scale.  Interestingly, I think he picked that up in 8th grade where the students created their own rules.

  • Failing the test was the right consequence of the mistake he made.

I was impressed by the matter-of-fact way he accepted the situation.  He realized he’d made a mistake and that he should not blame others for it.   That shows a low self-orientation, another Trust Equation component.

Intimacy Trumps Failure

After the officer terminated my son’s driving test less than a minute after it started, he told my son that he had made the same mistake a couple of years before.  The officer turned left without looking right and almost hit someone in a wheel chair.   The officer exposed his own vulnerability and he connected with my son in that moment.  The truth is, that moment of intimacy made my son’s respect and admiration for the officer grow a little and I think my son grew a little too.

My son learned a lot about failure and success.  And about living.

Straight from the Headlines: Trust in People, Companies, Nations

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Three trust-related headlines last week:
  1. An insider trading conviction for hedge-fund billionaire Raj Rajaratnam,
  2. A free-fall in Morgan Stanley’s stock price, and
  3. A drop in the Chinese government’s credibility.

A Person

Mr. Raj Rajaratnam, former head of the Galleon Group hedge fund, and once worth a billion and a half dollars, was sentenced to 11 years in prison.  His crimes were the stuff of movies—secret deals and secret messages—insider trading.

Some finance theorists think “insider trading” should be legalized, though most people would sooner see heroin legalized if they had to choose.  Rajaratnam’s white-collar hand-in-the-cookie-jar crimes are, it is generally agreed, egregious and immoral. He’s going where he belongs.

Raj is a poster child for low trust. Lying, cheating, conniving, sneaking—he was everything you wouldn’t want in a trusted partner.

But he is a sideshow. Rajaratnam, Bernie Madoff, Ivan Boesky—these are the movie versions of white-collar crime. Raj and Bernie no more caused our current financial malaise than Bonnie and Clyde caused the Great Depression. And we cannot solve our global trust problems by simply picking off colorful foot soldiers from the Dark Side, no matter how untrustworthy they are.

A Company

Jesse Eisinger in the NYTimes notes that by nearly every financial measure of strength and trustworthiness—more capital, longer-term financing, lower leverage—Morgan Stanley is a stronger bank than it was in September 2008, at the height of the crisis. So, why has their stock price dropped 42% this year?

Trust, that’s why.

Morgan Stanley, and other banks, still holds massive amounts (defined as over $50 trillion) in unregulated derivatives. And of course they don’t want regulation. But they are not stupid—the banks themselves are not about to trust each other when they know the other guy is holding part of that unregulated $50 trillion. As Eisinger puts it:

“Surely no bank would be so reckless as to accept dodgy collateral these days. It would hold out for something unassailable, like, say, Triple A mortgages on American homes. Wait, scratch that. It would accept sovereign debt, perhaps from some European realm that has been around for centuries. Whoops, no, no. Well, O.K., maybe United States Treasuries—and we’ll agree to ignore that one of the country’s two major political parties was willing to plunge the United States into default to achieve its aims.”

The banks don’t trust each other. They do agree that they don’t want governments checking their numbers; they also agree that letting Lehman go was a big mistake—that governments should be willing to bail them out.

But the people are not too happy about their governments bailing out the rich guys, whether they’re at OWS, in Greece, or even in Germany.  The governments are looking like neither paragons of virtue nor representatives of their citizenry.

A Country

Never mind the GOP playing chicken with the US’s credit ratings; never mind Germans and Greeks playing chicken with Europe. As Reuters notes:

Equities jumped 10 percent on the day three years ago when China said it would buy up bank shares in the market. They barely budged after a similar announcement on Monday. The difference is credibility. A sustained financial crisis has shown that governments around the world have a limited ability to make things better.

Nations around the world have kicked the can down the road regarding public expenditures. They’ve done the same thing regarding energy and the environment.

The human race has been conspicuously failing recently at two key trust skills—collaboration and constructive confrontation.

Trust Recovery: Where Do We Start?

Yes, it’s complicated. There are feedback loops everywhere. Beware of simple answers. 9-9-9 may work in a computer simulation game, but does not a tax plan make.  8-8-8 is not the answer to health care, and 7-7-7 is a better lotto number than a plan for campaign finance.

But complexity works both ways. It means the whole system is loaded with causality.  No single change at the person, policy or institution level may be necessary, or sufficient. But actions at every level do have impacts. We can push back at the personal level, at the company level, and at the national level.

It is a good thing that Raj Rajaratnam got the longest-ever prison sentence for insider trading; it sets a moral tone that is in stark contrast to an amoral ideology that we have allowed to infect our entire commercial sector.

It is a good thing that people are protesting the serious transfer of wealth and power that has taken place in recent years, because increasing inequality ruins social trust.

Yes, it’s complex to recover trust, but it can start simply. Here are three steps.

1.    Promote personal character. Don’t fudge your taxes. Don’t lie, don’t ask others to do so, and just say no to those who ask you to do so. Teach your children. Thank people who do good and shame those who don’t. Stick your neck out a little. On alternate Thursdays, pay the toll for the car behind you.  Pick out a small sum of money and give it to a charity that needs it more than you do.

2.    Promote better thinking. We have seen the result of four decades of economists who think that markets are self-clearing and that financial institutions will self-regulate out of concern for their reputation; business theorists who preach competition instead of collaboration; CEOs who think the purpose of a company is to raise shareholder wealth; and politicians who think either that government is a feeding trough or that interstate highways are communist plots.

The result is not good, and much of the trouble arises from bad beliefs. We will not solve our problems through belief in econometrics, patent litigation, or demonization of foreigners. Tell the b-school professors, the law schools, the think tanks and the industry associations to apply their talents to understanding and building systems around collaboration instead.

We are, in fact, all in this together. We need to start believing it so we can act on this belief.

3.    Promote better politicians. Don’t support simplistic ideologies.  Stop contributing to single-issue pressure groups. Scream for campaign finance reform; on everything else, stop screaming.

Read up. On alternate Tuesdays, watch Fox or CNBC, whichever one you makes you uncomfortable. On alternate Fridays, read a foreign newspaper online. Don’t give money to, talk about, or vote for candidates who out-negative their opponents.  Support those with a message and a plan of their own.

Tell the media, the politicians and anyone who wants your support that you’re done with vague platitudes and simple slogans. Tell them you want the truth.

Ask them, “Why should I trust you?” And don’t settle for an answer you can’t believe in.