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What’s Trust Got to Do With Respect?

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On the one hand, the connection between trust and respect seems clear. As Thomas Friedman put it:

I’m often asked how I, an American Jew, have been able to operate so successfully in the Arab world. My answer is simple: it is to be a good listener. It has never failed me. Listening is a sign of respect. If you truly listen to the other person, they will then listen to what you have to say.

Aretha Franklin just spelled it out.

Behaving respectfully toward others is likely to increase your trustworthiness in others’ eyes, and to make them more likely to trust you.

But should it work the other way? What if someone is disrespectful to us? Should we then behave in a less trustworthy way toward them? Should we trust them less?

There’s an equally venerable point of view that says get over it, sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me, someone can hurt you emotionally only with your permission, hear other people but do not allow your emotions to be held hostage by theirs.

Of course, sometimes name-calling is a prelude to violence; disrespect can signal untrustworthiness. Only a fool doesn’t look for a nearby exit door in such situations.

But we over-rate how often that is true.

This territory of trust, listening and respect is rife with opportunities for self-improvement. Strive to respect others—not in the ways you would be respected, but in ways the other person would consider as being respected. Which means listening, very attentively.

But when disrespected, strive to rise above it. Return respect for disrespect, by listening for motives and for understanding.

Does this mean holding ourselves to a higher standard than others? And is that disrespectful in itself?

I’d like to think not. On some absolute scale, all of us are awful at this. When you behave disrespectfully, notice it and resolve to do better in future. When someone is disrespectful towards you, notice how much like them you are, and resolve to overlook it on the spot.

December Carnival of Trust is Up

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The December 2008 Carnival of Trust is now officially up, courtesy of Stephanie West Allen at Idealawg. Many thanks to Stephanie for a fascinating set of selections.

Do yourself a favor and click through to her site to view the full set of the Top Ten selections. To whet your appetite, here are a few subjects Stephanie has selected:

–What a con man has to teach us about trust

–Seth Godin on trust

–25 behaviors that will destroy trust

–the 8 factors that go into evaluating a handshake.

And six more round out the Top Ten Trust selections this month. Fascinating stuff. Just what the Carnival should do–the tough job of screening the internet each month for interesting material on trust, and doing the heavy lifting by narrowing it down to the Top Ten. Must-trust reading.

Again, read the current Carnival of Trust here. Read past Carnivals here.

And if you’d like to submit your own blog post for consideration in next month’s Carnival, please do so by clicking here.

See you next month!

 

 

‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ Explains the Financial Crisis

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Frank Capra’s perennial Christmas movie “It’s a Wonderful Life” is remembered mainly for celebrating civic and familial virtues. George Bailey sacrifices his dreams for those of others, but in the end receives the greatest rewards of all.

But George was also a good industrial economist. Reluctant inheritor of dad’s Bedford Falls Building and Loan, he understood the institution’s role—to consolidate deposits into home loans, so Joe the debtor could escape the landlord tyranny of the evil Mr. Potter.

When Potter engineers a short squeeze and an angry run on the Building & Loan’s deposits, George takes the town to school on economics 101:

…you’re thinking of this place all wrong.
As if I had the money back in a safe. The money’s not here.
Your money’s in Joe’s house…that’s right next to yours.
And in the Kennedy House, and Mrs. Macklin’s house, and, and a hundred others. Why, you’re lending them the money to build, and then, they’re going to pay it back to you as best they can.
Now what are you going to do? Foreclose on them?

Fine, fine, you say. What’s that got to do with credit default swaps?

A lot.

The good folk of Bedford Falls were ready to take Old Man Potter’s offer of 50 cents on the dollar, until George Bailey personally talked them down. People were confident in him and trusted him. Trust and confidence were the coin of the realm for JP Morgan, and for George Bailey, and are again today.

Say you start a bank with $10,000 in equity. You make a $6,000 loan. You’ve got $4,000 left. If you loan that $4,000, you’re tapped out. That’s when you discover deposits, aka liabilities, which let you make many more loans, aka assets.

The amount by which you can leverage your equity to make more loans depends on how stable your assets and liabilities are. If you make bad loans, your asset quality declines. If you take on bad liabilities—securitized mortgages or CDOs, let’s say—then you may have to sell assets to cover your obligations.
Presto, there’s your bank run.

The run may be driven by Bedford Falls’ rubes, or by some Old Man Potter from Greenwich, but a run is a run is a run.

If someone doesn’t trust your balance sheet, the whole structure unwinds. It starts out as a liquidity crisis. Then it morphs into a solvency crisis. Finally it is revealed for what it is—a crisis of trust and confidence.

Is it really that simple? How could Hollywood possibly get something so much more right than the risk-meisters of Wall Street?

Yes, Virginia, it really is that simple. One thing Hollywood knows is that the true story is always about character development. The rest is just updated movie sets, hot off the street dialogue, and the latest “it” actors. But the thing that art imitates is–life. Character. Trust and confidence.

George Bailey’s character development lay in realizing his power to create trust and confidence in his community.

Any parallels with incoming presidents and the potential for good they may have exist strictly in the movies in your heads. (Which after all is where trust and confidence reside, not in risk models.)

Do You Trust Detroit?

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My clients usually assume that subject matter expertise is the biggest driver of trust.  Usually, they’re wrong—greed, self-orientation and an inability to take personal risks are often the culprit.

But not always.  Sometimes, incompetence matters.  Detroit is one of those cases.  In a post  by Om Malik, The Market Meltdown and the Question of Trust, Malik suggests the Big 3 have lost touch with commonsense. 

Malik is an optimist. 

Allow me to demonstrate.

Toyota introduced the Prius in 1997.  11 years later, GM brought us–the Hybrid Escalade.  The Big 3’s CEOs fly their private jets to Washington to beg for money without a plan.

This level of cluelessness is not random; it is the result of 50 years of really bad management. Detroit became the East Germany of American management.  Here’s one small measure of just how they did it.

Ward’s Automotive Yearbook, the Bible of the US industry, used to annually publish US market share statistics—for models of US produced cars.  For the others, one size fit all—the line item was called “imports.”  The official stats-keeper of the industry tracked 50-60 US car models, but lumped together Rolls Royces with Toyotas and Volkswagens.

In 1963, “imports” totaled 386,000–5.1% of the US market.

By 1967, “imports” were 7.3%–still combining Nissans and Maseratis in one category, while giving the AMC Rebel its own line on the chart.

In 1968, “imports” hit 9.3%; in 1972, 12.6%. The market share table listed 59 separate US passenger car models, yet the 1.2M “foreign imports” were grouped in just one line.  

“Imports” came to equal the entire output of the Chrysler corporation; exceed all of American Motors; exceed all of the Lincoln-Mercury division of Ford, not to mention Pontiac, Buick, Oldsmobile and Cadillac.  Of the Big Three producers, only GM’s Chevrolet division and Ford Motor Company’s Ford division sold more cars than “imports.” 

Yet Detroit was guilty of automotive racism–they all looked the same.  Those "imports."

Over the years, Detroit management blamed the following: a “surprise” shift to small cars in the late ’70s; US tax policy; Japanese industrial policy; dumping; unemployment; US engineering education; a pro-Asian faddish cult of style in California; poor technology; labor costs; health care costs; pension costs; the UAW; suppliers; dealers; government regulation.

Not until the 1992 issue of Ward’s–when the US market share of “Imports” had passed 31% in 1988 and 1989–did the table break out “import” statistics to distinguish a Honda Civic from a Mercedes.

The self-description of an industry says a lot.  It declares to one and all, this is what we believe, and this is what you must know if you want to understand our industry.

Decisions about language and statistics quickly become self-reinforcing.  The more you see the data in a certain way, the more obvious it becomes that this must be reality.  In Detroit’s case, the belief was The Big 3 = the auto industry.

Swanson, the original “TV dinner” failed to capitalize on its advantage; a magazine explained,  “It was one thing to have missed the trend toward Thai; it was quite another to have missed Italian.”

Missing the relevance of “imports” for over 30 years qualifies as “missing Italian.”

There is no rescue for an endemic mindset like this.  It has to be broken up.  Incompetence on this scale and depth demands nothing less.  The suppliers and workers of the US auto industry are the victims here, but we cannot afford to use the sclerotic bureaucracies named GM, Ford, or Chrysler to be agents of rescue.

We really do need bold new thinking here: Obama’s economic team, are you listening?

In the spirit of trying to offer some breakthrough ideas, here are a few starters:

•    Give Toyota $10 billion to be used solely for hiring US workers and establishing a US auto industry de novo; limit repatriation of earnings for political palatability, but get someone running the industry who is not blinded.  

•  Sell the brands, re-hire the workers; blow up the companies, and (severely) retrain the execs for work outside the auto industry;

•    Bail out workers and retirees through massive infrastructure programs and assumption of pension liabilities. 

•    Build up Michigan tourism (as a former Michigander, I’ll testify to the State’s beauty and resources).

•    Ban from the industry anyone who used to have his name on his parking slot. 

•    Move marketing HQs to coastal locations like Miami or Los Angeles 

•    Require all marketing execs to speak at least two languages

I do not have the answers, but it’s going to take something this drastic. 

Trust destroyed this badly cannot be recovered by those who lost it.

 

 

The Etiquette of Selling

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There is such a thing as etiquette.  It isn’t just about Emily Post and table settings, either. 

Etiquette is the rules of the Game of Association Between People.  All people, everywhere. And while not all the rules are written, you violate them at your risk.

One of those rules is that intimacy has a pace and a sequence.  Some things are done only after other things, and usually with a certain elapsed time. 

I know you’re thinking of romantic relationships at this point, and that’s fine; it’s a pretty good case in point.  Some things you don’t say or do until other things are said or done.

We forget that exactly the same rules apply in sales.  Which is precisely the point made by Michael Holt, CEO of the design firm gardyneHOLT in Auckland, New Zealand in the following email he shared with me. 

Michael met a financial planner at an Expat Show in Shanghai.  He spoke for perhaps 15 seconds with the person—let’s call him Joe Planner–and exchanged business cards.  He later received a letter from Joe.  Here is Michael’s reaction:

Hello Joe Planner,

Thanks for your email and I did look at your site. Very comprehensive, although I must say, I am usually put off by obvious stock photography rather than real images of your firm, your people, your office, your clients.  I feel that stock images are trying to hide something.

However, in response to your email, you say that you "remember that we spoke about ways to help me save."  Umm… no we didn’t, Joe. I’m sure that your email is a form letter and you’ve just put it out to me along with many other people.  Do you think that you can build a relationship with me, in offering a customized and tailored service… by commencing with a form letter? Do you think I’ll feel that you’ve given me any more thought than entering me into your sales follow up database?

Can you think of something more critically important to me that my future financial well-being, and yet you want me to trust you with that when you have an incorrect recollection of our opening conversation?  Of course I understand that you’ll have met many people at that event, but why state then that you remember our topic of conversation when you don’t?

I feel that you are following up to a pile of received business cards, including mine, and you’re being a good sales guy by doing the numbers game work. That’s fine and perfectly normal… for a commoditized and process-driven business process.  Except of course, that I’m a person, and not a box.

As it happens, I have a complex set of financial arrangements centering around establishing branches of my firm in 2 countries overseas right now, and where I’ll be living with my family from next year.  All this amidst global financial insecurity.  I’m looking for a partner and advisor that treats me with respect, that asks more than it sells/tells and that doesn’t insult my intelligence with form letters.

Best of luck,

Michael Holt
CEO

Michael is simply voicing what we all know as customers.  There is a law of etiquette in sales. Some things you don’t say or do until other things are said or done.

Joe didn’t follow the law of etiquette in sales.  In return he received the predictable consequence–in this case voiced by Michael.

I think Michael said it pretty well.
(BTW, he tells me he didn’t hear back from Joe Planner.)  
 

Trust and Regulation

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Regulation is a social substitute for trust.

That’s not a moral statement, just a factual one.

Sometimes the relationship between trust and regulation is obvious We submit to the regulation of traffic laws because we can’t trust everyone will simultaneously interpret the rules of the road similarly. And, when stoplights fail, we trust the regulation of traffic cops, whose very jobs are the result of a citizenry’s decision to be regulated.

Another regulatory no-brainer would seem to be the “commons,” i.e. a situation where, at the margin, it’s in everyone’s personal best interest to behave selfishly. Except that, when everyone does so, everyone turns out the loser. (In game theory, the “prisoner’s dilemma” spells this out). We can’t trust everyone (or even most people) to do what’s socially good, so we submit to regulation.

So it is we end up with regulated airspace and water tablesthough there are still crazies who insist they should be able to fly anything anywhere anytime, and drill any water drillable beneath their half acre of Arizona; plus, we still over-fish.

Closely related are natural monopolies, e.g. utilities (except, bafflingly to me, water companies in the UK). These businesses left unregulated will drift, often quickly, to monopolies. Much of regulatory debate is how to balance society’s interest vs. the normal trappings of markets. (Can we trust Microsoft to innovate? Airlines to share route rights? Telecom companies to share scale economies?)

The right degree of regulation for natural monopolies would be an easy matter for industrial economists, if only political ideologues nattering about free markets vs. socialism would leave them alone.

Much less is clear when it comes to naturally competitive markets in which people and companies behave in an untrustworthy manner toward customers, shareholders, employees and society. Here the issues become more clearly trust-related.

Can we trust the stockbroker’s motives when he recommends a stock? The food company’s label of ‘organic?’ Can we trust that the insurance company will be there when it’s claim time? Can we trust that a corporate email sent in confidence will be treated as such? That a doctor’s prescription is not unduly influenced by a pharmaceutical company?

Here are a few social policy rules of thumb for thinking about the relationship between trust and regulation.

1. Trust—where possible—is preferable to regulation. It avoids moral hazard; it is cheaper; and it is specific to the situation at hand.

2. Industry associations have a potentially powerful role to play. Too often they see their role as defenders of their constituents against regulation, rather than the far more constructive and long-term perspective of evolving powerful self-regulation. (I have blogged on this topic before; for mortgage banking, see my blogpost here; ; for financial planning, see here. Or, simply look at the regulatory nightmare the pharmaceutical industry has become, largely by failure to self-regulate.)

3. Certain industrial economics criteria cry out for regulation. If no one—investor, regulator, customer—has an integrated interest across a sector of business, then the situation is rife for abuse. The securitized mortgage industry had no one with an integrated perspective.  Regulation becomes by default attractive in such cases.

4. All else equal, short-term perspectives destroy trust and invite regulation.

5. Transparency may be the least costly form of regulation. It works best when obvious  It works best when obvious: e.g., "smoking causes cancer," or "these assets were marked to market."  Transparency as "the fine print" loses its power quickly. 

6. If an industry is fond of saying things like “caveat emptor,” or “hey it’s not illegal,” or “we’re only giving the consumer what they want,” look out. This is defensive language, typically used against stakeholder complaints—Big Tobacco, Big Food, and, I suspect, melamine producers in China.

7. Personally, I think business-school faculty have a huge responsibility. In an increasingly hyper-linked world, the competition-centric ideology taught as “strategy” is increasingly dysfunctional. It destroys trust by teaching that the natural state of business is to compete against our suppliers and customers, rather than to collaborate with and serve them.

By destroying trust, it invites regulation. Which, as stated in point one above, is the less preferable of the two.

Business, heal thyself; it’s better for all.

Zen and the Art of Trusted Advisorship

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In our Trusted Advisor workshops and coaching engagements, we spend a lot of time on listening. Why? Because not listening is one of the top two causes of trust breakdown. (The other — accelerating too quickly to a solution – is another form of not listening.)

Listening is critical to advice-giving because it’s through listening that we earn the right to offer advice.

There are many reasons we humans do a crappy job of listening. One of my favorites: the little internal voice that clogs our brain with incessant chatter.

(Don’t have a little voice in your head? Your little voice is the one that says, “What little voice? I don’t have a little voice.”)

A 30-second snippet from a typical internal dialogue:

Client: [insert reasonable work-related comments here]

Your little voice: “Uh oh. I should have spent more time preparing for this meeting. You know, I’m not sure I like this guy.”

Client: [insert reasonable work-related comments here]

LV: “I do like his tie. The suit, not so much.”

LV: “Did I remember to take my black suit to the drycleaner?”

Client: [insert reasonable work-related comments here]

LV: “I wish he’d hurry up and finish so I can re-focus this conversation. He’s taken us way off course.”

And so it goes. Like static on a radio station, the little voice interferes with our ability to tune in.

Which begs the question: How to reduce the static to improve our listening so that we, in turn, will be listened to?

Unfortunately, that little voice will never go away – it comes with being human. But there are ways to minimize it. Here are my Top Three:

1. Prepare your mind. This suggestion comes directly from The Trusted Advisor (page 200, if you must know). Train your brain to notice random chatter, and substitute some wry wisdom of your own choosing. Examples:

“I am not the center of the universe.

"It’s a ‘we’ game, not a ‘me’ game.”

“A point of view doesn’t commit you for life.”

“Knowing the truth is better than not knowing it.”

You can also make this part of your pre-flight checklist before your next big client meeting.

2. Get a little Zen. When the chatter arises, notice and observe it; raise your consciousness about it in the moment and gently but swiftly return your focus to the real conversation at-hand. This is similar to the practice that experienced meditators use of returning to the breath when “monkey mind” (a mind that jumps from thought to thought like a monkey jumps from tree to tree) takes over.

3. Think out loud. Get the chatter out of your head and into the conversation. This is especially valuable when your little voice is expressing a concern. Here are some examples:

LV: “He seems distracted.”

What you might say: “Let’s take a time out to be sure we’re going in the right direction with this conversation.”

LV: “I’m not sure she understands what I’m getting at.”

What you might say: “At the risk of appearing a little assertive here, may I be blunt?”

LV: “I am doing a lot of talking; someone shut me up!”

What you might say: “I’m hearing myself doing a lot of the talking here. What haven’t I asked about that’s important for me to know?”

This one requires some risk-taking. As does all trust.

You’re not crazy for having the little voice; you’re human. Do your clients – and yourself – a favor by training your brain to tune chatter out, client in. By listening, you earn the right to be listened to.

The Fallacy of Good Intentions

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Have you ever messed up? Messed up badly enough that you feel awful about it, can’t wait to apologize, to try and make it better? And to have others forgive you?

And have you included in your apology/explanation words like, “I really didn’t mean for it to come out that way, it’s really ironic because I didn’t mean for that to happen, I never meant any harm, my intentions were good, I didn’t mean to do anything wrong, I’m really sorry if I hurt anyone because I didn’t intend to, I feel bad because I never meant to, I apologize to anyone who might have been hurt because I didn’t mean to, etc.”

Let me guess: that part didn’t work out so well, did it? And it still feels so unfair, doesn’t it? After all—my intentions were good; why can’t they see I meant well and stop saying and thinking all those bad things about me?

Here’s why. Intentions matter greatly in assessing initial trust. We judge whether another’s words and deeds are aimed at their own self-aggrandizement, or whether they’re intended to help us. A sense that another’s intentions are good can overcome things like credentials and price.

But if things go wrong, intentions do not get you a pass. In fact, they can make it worse. Because when we trust someone and it bombs, we assume only bad things.

Perhaps we conclude you lied about your intentions—which means you took advantage of us. Or we decide it means you turned out to be incompetent—which means you didn’t even know your own weaknesses. Which means your good intentions were either lies or irresponsibly misleading.

Worst of all, however, is continuing to protest that your intentions were good. Because if they’re lies or worthless, and you keep insisting on them, it means you are incapable of learning, and of focusing outside yourself. Why else would you keep talking about it?

When you’ve messed up, let yourself feel the pain, or disgust, or regret, or whatever you feel. Then own up to it to yourself. Your intentions no longer matter. They turned out to be irrelevant. The other person now has plenty of reasons to mistrust you. Don’t make it worse by forcing your failed intentions in the other’s face. They. Do. Not. Care.

After a while, say something like:

Look, I really messed up on this. I realize I did X, and Y, and maybe even Z, and put you at risk for Q. I’m not even fully sure why I did this, but I know I did it, and I’m working on figuring out why. I want to make it better, if you’ll let me. This was my responsibility and my error. And I apologize to you for it; I am sorry I did it.

Period. Let it be. Resist the temptation to sneak a little bit of “I-didn’t-mean-it” in there. If asked “how could you do that, were you trying to do that?” you can simply say, “No, I did not mean to do that,” and leave it at that. Only if someone persists on wanting to know your mental state should you go past it. And even then, don’t let it be an excuse, just an explanation, and keep your answers real short.

The road to hell, they say, is paved with good intentions. And how often have you really intended to do something messed up anyway?

Let it go. Take ownership. Own it. Grow up.

Financial Engineering is Just the Tip of the Management Engineering Iceberg

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There’s a temptation to see Wall Street’s exoti-toxic creations as sui generis, unconnected from the “good” businesspeople out there and from the sound principles being taught in business schools, executive education programs and consultancies.

Unfortunately, that’s not true. All the securitization, derivatives, synthetic securities, credit default swaps and exotic risk models were not the lone result of a sector run amok. They arose from precisely the same management thinking being taught to auto manufacturers, pharmaceutical firms, airlines, accountants and agriculture.

You can boil it down to three beliefs.

• The first is to look at your business as processes, and to break them into ever-and-ever smaller pieces.
• The second is to outsource any process which isn’t strategic to your business and which can be done more cheaply by someone else.
• The third is to tightly measure the processes, both outsourced and internal, and then to manage them according to process-based metrics; the shorter the time-frame and the more precise the measures, the better.

Any MBA from the last ten years (maybe twenty) can swear that these are commonly accepted—and most of them will say they themselves have considered them bedrock beliefs. Even that they are “obviously true.”

Watch out for “obvious truths.”

Those three beliefs explain the financial industry’s meltdown.

1. Take a bank. Describe it as a set of processes—e.g. the mortgage lending process–and all its constituent processes.
2. Outsource the pieces of the mortgage lending process; e.g. farm out loan acquisition, servicing, credit approval; then sell off the loan itself, to be further sliced and diced and securitized.
3. Sign short-term contracts with the above outside services; make the payments transactional rather than pay-over-time, and link them to tightly defined benchmarks and indicators.

Voila.

One effect is to make the set of processes more efficient and more global–at least on paper (though many golden crumbs also stick to the new process owners along the way).

But–n the name of lowered costs and risks–we ended up with higher costs and higher risks. It’s because those three beliefs also gave us something else.

An industry in which:

• no one player (or regulator) any longer owns a piece of the whole “mortgage lending process”
• no one player has significant time-based interest in the integrity of the whole business
• players are connected only through adjacent fragments, through short-term transactional fees, and by proxy metrics 2-3 steps below and shorter than final long term results measures.

You couldn’t design a better system to encourage obfuscation, greed, and lack of trust.

Those same core beliefs are at work in mainstream business, eating away at the superstructure of business trust like termites in the beams. They are insidious because we think they are best practices.

They are common practices, but hardly best. They separate the future from the present, allowing people to suck forward the present value. And they separate the parts from the whole, allowing a failure of integrity.

We can do better.

 

A Contender for Worst Business Advice of 2008

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If your customers trust you, that’s good, right? Like, really good?

So suppose you wanted to ruin trust with your customers. What would you do to destroy trust?

• You might try lying to the client.
• You might try saying one thing and doing another.
• You could try keeping secrets from the customer.
• You could refuse to answer direct questions.
• You could actively prevent your customers from learning about cost-saving solutions.

Incredibly, these are specific recommendations made by a business blog, Drooling for Dollars (the name tells you something), in a post titled “A Successful Businessman Keeps Secrets From His Clients.”

In this post, the author offers nuggets like “never let a client know your hourly rate,” “tell your client that the work will be completed in 3 weeks although you get it done in 3 days,” and talks about “those irritating and annoying clients who ask too many questions before making a deal.”

It’s good to answer some questions, says the piece–it helps build trust. But don’t go overboard with it—trust could ruin you if those nasty competitors called “customers” find out too much.

The author summarizes: “There are pieces of information you should never reveal to your client, no matter how many times they ask or how much they insist you [sic].”

Uh huh? Really?

Anyone wanna help me shoot some fish in a barrel? The comment section is right below.