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Trust and Reputation: the Virtuous Link

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I awoke at home on a sunny (!) morning in London last week to the dulcet tones of Bill Clinton’s erstwhile Labor Secretary, Robert Reich, talking about BP on the BBC:

“To start with, it actually helped that they were British. We listen to the accent and think that they are just more intelligent than us! But their reputation has badly suffered. They have lost a great deal of public trust. After all, this is not the first time that BP has had serious safety and environmental problems in North America.”

As a Brit who loves America, I recognize the piece about Americans going all mushy (you would say ‘gaga,’ yes?) about the old British accent!  But this is not to diminish the seriousness of the situation in the Gulf of Mexico and the horrific consequences for the environment, the livelihood of many thousands of people, and the future of the oil industry. The thick clouds of the Gulf disaster will need to carry a very strong silver lining in terms of improved environmental consciousness to mitigate such negative consequences. And no doubt the British accent is now beginning to grate.

The Labor Secretary struck a chord in linking the notions of trust and reputation. I’ve seen both arising in recent discussions with organisations, and it raises a Big Question:

Are trust and reputation the same things? Does one drive the other? And if not, just what is the relationship between the two?

Trust and Reputation

We know that reputations are hard won. They are valuable assets for organisations and individuals. Good will is a major component of corporate balance sheets. And reputations are built for certain characteristics: Helen Mirren for brilliant acting (and a classy British accent!);Tesco for execution; 3M for innovation; Obama for rhetoric, and so forth.

Sometimes those reputations are for being trustworthy, but they are generally for a whole range of characteristics other than trust. We would argue that the role of trust is in the nurturing and sustaining of a strong reputation; this nurturance is essentially a trust-building process.

Observe when reputations suffer and are lost, a painful process caught by Shakespeare in the words of Othello:

“The purest treasure mortal times afford is spotless reputation; that away, men are gilded roam or potted clay.”

As reputations wane, so does trust. As Robert Reich stated above, a loss of public trust in BP comes with their tarnished reputation for safety and environmental protection. The UK has recently seen reduced trust in politicians as their reputation for probity has suffered in the recent expenses scandal. Candidates for the leadership of the UK Labour Party are now saying that the Iraq decision led to an unraveling of trust as the Labour Party’s reputation for principled decision-making suffered.

(We could even go back to the writings of Edmund Burke who, in the early 1770’s, argued that the growing abuse of power in the American colonies by King George and his ministers was leading to a collapse of trust!)

In other words: organisations and individuals earn and retain our trust in their reputations.  Without this trust, those reputations fall away. As child is father to the man, trust begets reputation; and the loss of trust drags the latter down with it as well.

A Principled Approach to Trust and Reputation

For me, it is to the Four Trust Principles that we should turn to guide the process for building and sustaining trust in a reputation:

1.    Focus first on the customer.

Last winter, I had problems in a cold snap with my car brakes. I booked the car into a local garage and set out on a snowy, icy morning, only to slither to a helpless halt on the first corner. Most other drivers ignored me. Some hooted, others shouted out unintelligible advice, while I sat there immobile.

A large van stopped.  A group of young men who spoke no English and an older guy who spoke some all jumped out, took a look, and dove under the car with hammers to free up my frozen brakes. In minutes, the car was fixed.

I looked on incredulous. “We used to see this every winter morning in Poland,” the man said. I asked where they were working and went to have a chat with them later in the day. I found they were builders. I inquired about them; all reports were of outstanding care and attention, so it was easy for me to put them on the tender list recently for some big building work at our house. They won the competition hands down, and we are delighted with the service they are giving us.

Every single encounter we have with them—beginning with the first, when they had no idea we might be possible customers–reinforces our trust and confidence in their reputation for outstanding domestic building work. They sold by doing, demonstrating both reliability and a focus on the customer as a principled part of their behavior.

2.     Transparency.

When working for a large consultancy a few years ago, we hit a critical moment in negotiating the potential terms for a significant deal for a global client. This would involve a very different pricing model for us. Very radically for us, we opened our books to the client (this took quite some persuasion of our leadership team!) and established a shared understanding that led to a mutually beneficial deal.

Our striking transparency strengthened our growing reputation for straight talking, client-centered consulting.

3.     Long term perspective.

A colleague of mine has been working for a global organisation for some time. A couple of years ago he was asked to do something that he could have done but not quite to the quality his client was used to. He also knew others who could do the job better than he. So he introduced them in his place. He has since carried out a number of other assignments for the same client.

By taking a long-term perspective, his client trusted even more his hard won reputation for doing, above all, what was in the right interests of the client. By taking what appeared to be a short-term risk, he actually reduced risk by focusing on the longer term.

4.    Collaboration.

One conclusion about the recent financial services crisis is that some of the banks became too focused on the interests of a narrow group of stakeholders in their pursuit of profit, losing sight of their previous client-based model of which collaboration with a wide range of stakeholders was a key ingredient. They thereby lost our trust in their espoused reputation for looking after the interests of all their customers, many of whom will suffer for a number of years from Governments’ fiscal adjustments.

This need for intense collaboration – with regulators, customers, suppliers, politicians, environmentalists, shareholders and local people – also defines the trust-building process that BP need to mount now to salvage their reputation. As Peter Firestein elegantly argues, it is aggressive, proactive engagement that is needed after a reputational slip.

“There is a short list of companies who have come out of disasters with stronger reputations than they had before. In all cases, they did so because they were able to identify with those who were angry with them. They actively participated in the aftermath to the disaster.”

Reputation and Trust: The Linkage

Reputation and trust are close relatives–but are not one and the same. Organisations and individuals have reputations for a whole range of characteristics other than trust.

The role of trust lies in the process by which organisations and individuals build and sustain confidence in those reputations. By focusing on the Four Trust Principles of putting the customer first, transparency, a long-term perspective and collaboration, reputation-building becomes a practicable endeavor.

With all good wishes for your reputation enhancing work!

How Much Should Sales Approaches Vary by Industry?

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An open letter to my readers:

Hi everyone. First, let me thank you for following TrustMatters. 

Now, let me tell you a bit about your fellow readers (and by extension, yourself). You are a disproportionately well-educated businessperson. You are most likely a professional—law, communications, accounting, consulting. Some of you are in financial services, some in software and technology; a lot of you follow new media heavily, some of you are curmudgeons. You’re more likely young than old, you’re pretty hip, and you’re pretty literate.

In the field of sales, there is a lot of range. More of you are in B2B than B2C. Some of you sell into government vs. selling into the private sector. Some of you sell to purchasing agents, others to ultimate users.  Many of you don’t like to think of yourselves as being in sales, though you know you have an impact on clients’ buying decisions.  And we all tend to look for that slice of life, those lessons, those situations that speak uniquely to our own little corner of experience—often dismissing the experiences of those who look different.  

Sometimes, though, we overstate the differences, and forget how much of great sales is fundamental, consistent, inviolable across nearly all sales situations.

I was reminded of this the other day by one of Jeffrey Gitomer’s weekly columns.

Jeffrey Gitomer: King of Sales

If you don’t know Jeffrey Gitomer, you’re missing something. He is bald, rumpled, given to 82-point powerpoint fonts, and looks disturbingly like late-night comic Dave Attell. He wears a red Staples-like shirt, and his normal volume level is a shout.

He grew up in rough-and-tumble sales, in central New Jersey. Cold-calling. Wearing out shoe-leather. Closing, handling objections, fighting for lead lists. Hard core.

I know what you’re thinking. I’ll say it for you. He looks like a hick. What could he possibly have to say to me, a successful (consultant / accountant / finance professional / commercial banker / software / technology) business developer?

Well, look again. By any measure of success and respect, he’s The Man. And if you go to his seminars, you’d be surprised at how much the crowd looks more like you than like him. So I’m very proud, by the way, to have a testimonial quote from Jeffrey Gitomer on the front page of my own Trust-based Selling.

Gitomer’s List of Smart and Dumb Sales

But don’t take my word for it. Take a look at Gitomer’s recent ezine article How to Sell Best: Ask Someone Who Buys. It’s a great collection of wisdom from a purchasing agent fan of his about how salespeople blow it, and how they succeed.

My point is not how bright the purchasing agent is (very), but the fact that Gitomer—with all his schticky-hicky presentation—chose to highlight it in his e-zine. Because he believes in it.

Here’s an abridged list of what Gitomer considers smart—and dumb. (For more detail, see his original piece).

smart 1. Honesty. Truth at all times and at all costs.

dumb 1. Telling an expedient lie.

smart 2. Give me valuable ideas.

dumb 2. Function only as an order-taker.

smart 3. Understand and be interested in my business.

dumb 3. Communicate non-sense.

smart 4. Treat me with respect.

dumb 4. Use bad manners.

smart 5. Be a decent human being, with some sense of ethics and morals.

dumb 5. Schmooze bad about the competition.

smart 6. Know your own business cold.

dumb 6. Assume that I know nothing about your business.

smart 7. Be friendly and personable.

dumb 7. Fail to attempt to form a relationship.

smart 8. Remember the details.

dumb 8. Make a presentation with no copy of your proposal or supporting materials to leave behind.

smart 9. Make good on your word.

smart 10. Take responsibility.

dumb 10. Refuse to take responsibility; shift blame to other people.

Single smartest. Don’t "sell" me. Let me "buy."

Single dumbest. Manipulate me.

Now, let me ask the accountants out there: is there any item on that list that is wrong for selling tax, attest or risk management work to your clients?

Systems consultants: which items don’t apply to you?

Financial planners: which items apply only to big box stores, but not to you?

And so on for the rest of us. 

For my part, I can’t think of one that doesn’t apply. More importantly, if I did my own Top Ten smart/dumb list, it wouldn’t add or subtract much, if anything. 

And if all that’s true—well, let’s explore some implications.

First, when it comes to the important things—sales is sales is sales.

Second, maybe it’s time for us “professionals” to stop looking down on sales, and recognize that great sales are great professionals in every relevant sense of the word. Sell is no longer a 4-letter word. (Note to self: send email to inform Webster’s).

Third, about all that content expertise you’re in love with? It’s there all right: see items 2,3, and 6. But the other 7 items? They’re about relationships. 

Bottom line for me: there’s a conceit that exists in the professions, a deeply-embedded cleaner-hands-than-thou mentality, when it comes to selling. It’s unjustified, it’s wrong, it’s just another form of arrogance, and no one benefits from maintaining it. We all need to just get over it.

Great selling, above all, is about service to others: it requires great relationships.

What a metaphor for life.

     

Do You Trust a Robot? To Do What?

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Do you trust a robot?

Well, you might say, it depends: that depends on who did the programming. 

We do use the word ‘trust’ that way. We can ‘trust’ a robot to do the same thing, over and over. It doesn’t have bad motives, bad days, or bad blood. It does what it’s programmed to do.

But we would never say we’d trust a robot to “do the right thing,” or to “keep its owner’s best interest at heart,” or to “have a conscience.” That would just be silly. A robot is a machine. And silicon is not protein.

Yet much thinking about social trust amounts to nothing more than programming the robot. Got problems on Wall Street? Tweak the incentives. Oil drillers behaving badly? Rewrite the programmer rules of the MMS.

Much of that’s necessary. But it’s not sufficient. What’s to be done about all the non-robotic parts of society?

Sister Rettinger Uses Non-robotic Trust to Shame a Thief into Restitution

Writing programs for robotic trust is pretty simple. Go read one of the economists or psychologists who boil down all human behavior to the consistent pursuit of self-interest, and borrow their formula. Define a few processes, insert rules and conditional reward/pain payoffs, and voila—robotic trust.

But that won’t explain Pittsburgh’s Sister Lynn Rettinger: or the thief she undid with her voice:

Rettinger didn’t even have to break out a ruler for man who reached into an open window and stole a wallet from a car on Tuesday. She just needed the voice honed by nearly 50 years in Catholic schools.

After a teacher saw the man swipe the wallet, the 5-foot-3 principal of Sacred Heart Elementary School in the Shadyside neighborhood went outside and firmly told the man, "you need to give me what you have."

The unknown thief turned over the wallet, apologized and walked away.

Rettinger says she merely said what she says to students when she knows they have something they shouldn’t.

Let’s be clear: the Sister called out a stranger for misbehavior: and he responded. While strangers, they shared a moral code. While he was a lawbreaker and she just a little old woman, she trusted that he would not harm her, and that he would do the right thing.   And so he did.

The rules of interpersonal conduct—or morality, or trust, or conscience—are often considered to be far ‘softer’ than the rules governing physics, or programs governing robots. But Sr. Rettinger had enough confidence to calmly place a bet on their power. And she was right.

There is a power that exists between human beings, a binding web of mutuality, that we have systematically denied—to our own detriment.

5th Pillar in India Challenges Bribe-takers to Cease their Demands

Vijay Anand, chairman of 5th Pillar, has printed up over a million zero-rupee notes. The notes are to be given by poor people to officials who try to extort them for basic services.

When confronted with a demand for a bribe, the citizen offers up a zero-rupee note. This act turns out to have serious, positive consequences. In one case, “a corrupt official in a district in Tamil Nadu was so frightened on seeing the zero rupee note that he returned all the bribe money he had collected for establishing a new electricity connection back to the no longer compliant citizen.”

When engineered properly, the power of the force that binds people to each other can overwhelm the selfish power that economists presume drives us all.

Selfishness Is Over-rated: Trust is Under-Rated

I’m getting tired of hearing it cited routinely, over and over, as if it were self-evident, that people are selfish and will behave badly unless stopped or otherwise incented, especially if they work for companies.

They are not. People are vastly flawed and far from perfection; but they are also selfless and capable of great acts of generosity.

Dr. Robert Hoyk lists a number of ways we can think about increasing trust, many of which don’t involve behaviors and incentives. David Gebler suggests that culture drives trust , which seems perfectly obvious when you just put it that way. Then we catch wind of a headline and we’re off to the behavioral sanctions route once again.

Programming the robot; what does it get you? The same thing, over and over.   There’s a lot to like about dependability and reliability. Just don’t claim that’s all there is to trust.

What Reality TV Can Teach Us About Trust: You’re Cut Off

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As we’ve been hearing endlessly, various measures of trust have been declining for some years now. If and when the tide turns—what will we notice first? Here’s an interesting possibility: a shift in the tone of reality TV.

I am not a fan of reality TV shows. Most appeal to low-grade prurient interest (think Jersey Shore as an incestuous offspring of Jerry Springer). Others—Survivor being the prototype—just feature winning-at-all-costs competition.

I confess to having instantly liked two, however. One was American Idol, and I can explain why in two words: Simon Cowell. Not because he was snarky, but because he was the truth-teller, the voice of standards and quality and reality that everyone else wished they could wish away, but that ultimately ruled.

And, I was fascinated by the first year of The Apprentice. Then bored to tears by year two. I still have no idea why, but suspect Omarosa had something to do with it.

Well, here’s number three. I stumbled (honest!) upon a new VHS1 show called You’re Cut Off, and I’ll go out on a limb and make two predictions: first, this one’s going to be a hit. Second, it might be a harbinger of better times for trust.

Episode 1: Revenge of the Have-Nots

9 of the United States’ most selfish, preening, snobby, self-obsessed, narcissistic 20-something women are brought to Hollywood under false pretenses: that they’ll participate in a reality TV show called The Good Life. In a brilliantly contrived bit of theater, they are all filmed in a Rodeo Drive type luxury store simultaneously having their credit cards refused, and being sent to customer services.

Once gathered in customer services, they are informed that this is an intervention. The host of the show, a professional life coach, shows them video clips of their parents, husbands, and other enablers (none of these ladies are self-supporting) telling them, “It’s over, dear, you’re on your own; I hear Mickey D’s is hiring, you should go apply—because you’re cut off.” The looks on their faces are low-rent, bottom-feeding reality TV show at its best/worst, and you can’t help gloating over the public face-slapping these women have received.

But the ignominy is just beginning, as they’re driven away in vans (“a van? Do people actually drive in these? Where’s my limo?”) to a suburban house (“OMG, we’re in the ghetto…not even my housekeeper lives like this…”), where they proceed to descend even deeper by attacking each other.

At episode’s end, the life coach tells them the deal: they are to lose their evil ways, or they may lose their families for good. Even in episode 1, you can see the glimmer of insight in two pairs of eyes; and the power of continued denial in several more.

Episodes to Come: Redemption

The show is nicknamed “princess rehab,” and it’s apt. This is where I think the producers showed genius. There are only a few possible endings. The best ending is actually the most likely; that most of these basket cases achieve some level of self-realization and become at least willing to try to turn their lives around. 

Using an actual rehab, I suspect, wouldn’t work. Filming real interventions and real rehabs would require watching drug addicts and alcoholics, who would appear largely unsympathetic to a TV audience. But neither could we easily hate real addicts and alcoholics; the stories are too tragic and too real. And real world recidivism rates are depressingly high. It just wouldn’t work as TV.

Enter princess rehab: problem solved. We have no problem hating the self-absorbed, parodies of materialistic abuse that these ladies represent. And I suspect we will be drawn to a tale of a true convert. Any of the 9 who undergoes a Saul on the road to Damascus realization—or even shows big hints of getting it—will probably be welcomed by all of us.

As they (hopefully) renounce their wicked ways and tearfully join humanity, we will gladly accept them back, for they will have endorsed basic American values of self-reliance and humility. We’ll love them for having become just like us (or, more properly, just like what we like to think others think of us as being).

The show is set up to be about redemption; which makes it unlike any other I can think of (Biggest Loser seems tinged with self- and other-pity that I hope this show can avoid). What would it mean to have a reality TV show that is not about winning, beating others, outdoing each other in performing disgusting acts, forming backstabbing alliances, or faking love? That instead, is about redemption?

Lessons for Trust

I don’t think we’d have seen this show a few years ago. The mood of the country is cynical, mistrustful, especially about the rich and powerful, and these 9 young ladies will do very well as proxy lightning rods for the venting.

But the show is not set up to stop at revenge. Unlike all the others (including Biggest Loser) this one has the potential to be win-win-win. If most of the ladies learn to not take others for granted, to clean up their own kitchens, pick up after their dog, and think occasionally about the needs of others—well, there is no loser in that.  They all win. Society wins. 

And trust would win. The biggest destroyer of trust is extreme self-orientation.  These ladies exhibit that in spades at the outset. I suspect we’ll all be watching: first, to leer at the train-wreck of their lives; later, to see if they can redeem themselves.

Upcoming Events 6/11/2010

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Coming up next week we will be hosting our first webinar on our White Paper, "Think Again." Be sure to join us on either of the two dates listed below to find out more about Trusted Advisors and our Trust Quotient assessment.

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Tues. June 15th      Global Access          Sandy Styer

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

Wed. June 23rd      Global Access          Sandy Styer

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

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

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

Trust on the Toll Road

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Baseball, Billy Budd, and Business

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lessons in Taking Responsibility, Lessons in Acceptance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But wait, there’s more.

Lessons from Herman Melville for Business

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lessons from Baseball for Business

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Suggested reader: Jeffrey Skilling).

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

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

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

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

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

SNAP Selling, by Jill Konrath.

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

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

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

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

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

The MBA Oath, by Max Anderson and Peter Escher.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amy Gross on Discipline

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m Just a Soul Whose Intentions Are Good

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Big Oil and Its Intent

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

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

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

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

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

How Good Intentions Get Subverted

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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