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Great Selling by Truth Telling: A Best Buy Tale

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I was in Best Buy the other day.

The sales guy was excellent. He was open about what he knew and what he didn’t. He advised us to spend more, or to spend less, depending on what we wanted and needed in the several product lines we were exploring. He was candid. He spoke quickly and directly, in short, to-the-point sentences.

When we finished, I asked him, “You’re not on commission here, right?”

“No, not here. I’ve sold on commission before, though.”

“Which do you like better?” I asked.

“Oh, I prefer this. You can tell the truth.”

“You can tell the truth?”

“Yup. The other way, sometimes you’ve got to make the month, or bend it around for some other reason. It’s hard. Here you just tell the truth. It’s a lot easier.”

Just tell the truth–it’s a lot easier.

Let’s parse that: then evaluate it.

Why is it a lot easier?

1. There’s only one version of the truth—an infinity less to remember.
2. It’s easier to answer questions—it requires only short-term memory, not creative license.
3. It’s easier for people to tell you’re not lying.
4. People buy more from you if they feel you’re telling the truth.
5. People tell their friends; truth-telling is good marketing.

Of course, some people feel this is a sucker’s game. It’s sales right? The point isn’t to tell the truth, it’s to not get caught not telling the truth? To look like you’re telling the truth, not to actually tell it.

After all, we’re in business—right?

So let’s have a look at the numbers.

BBY Stock Chart

Here is a 5-year stock chart for Best Buy, tracked against the S&P500, and against Best Buy’s most obvious US competitor, Circuit City. (BBY is the one that ends at the top, by the way).

And sure, you can make charts look any way you want. I’m not trying to be an analyst here. I’m just saying the case is not only intuitive, but very plausibly empirical as well.

(By the way, Bear Stearns rated it underperform back in January. Goldman Sachs rates it a Buy.  Cheap shot? Maybe, but I’m just sayin’…)

Telling the truth is not stupid, wussy, or bad business. Far from it. It’s very good business. And for pretty obvious reasons.

And that’s the truth.

30 Minutes, 30 Cents, 30 Billion: Fragmenting Business

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A few weeks ago I sat next to an investment banker on a long flight. He works hand in hand with some of the super-quants on Wall Street who perform high-wire arbitrage through mathematical techniques so arcane that “I’d have to get two more math degrees just to understand them,” as my seatmate put it.
“Basically what they’re focused on is predicting the next 30 minutes,” he said. (Actually it may have been “the next 30 seconds,” I forget.  Anyway, day-trading for the Big Bucks, with lots of Other People’s Money).

At my destination, I heard a senior exec of one of the world’s high-tech success stories talk about their business model—“30 cents a transaction times billions of transactions, pretty soon you’re talking real money.” (How many of you remember Everett Duerksen, the originator of that line? Hey I’m not old, just well-read!).

30 minutes, 30 cents, 30 billions. Not your father’s bizmodel.

There is no shortage of economists who will gladly tell you the wonderful role these business models play. They mitigate risk; they lower costs; they create greater liquidity; they globalize geographically fragmented businesses.

Gosh, is there no downside? Of course there is. And it’s one of those two-sides-of-the-same-coin things.

The business world of today is heavily driven by two trends—fragmentation of processes, and globalization of scale. Break everything into tinier and tinier processes, and scale them globally. You get all the benefits listed above, but—what happens if no one has the big picture anymore?

You occasionally get myopic consultants and bankers—for a great example see this blog post from last year. 

But more importantly, you get situations where everyone is transaction-oriented, and no one has a stake in the integrity of the entire process.

The airline industry, many decades ago, was largely financed by insurance companies. The insurance companies tended to have ties to multiple airlines, partly to hedge their own risk.  Then the banks got into the business. Each bank picked a favorite—and given the peculiar economics of the airline industry, all the airline-bank pairs began to beat each other into the ground with excess capacity. The industry hasn’t made money for decades.

For a more current example, of course—subprime mortgages. When an industry gets dissected, disaggregated, and disintermediated, there may or may not be a problem. If a regulatory agency is there to see the big picture, that may be OK. If a risk-assessing industry is in place (bond ratings, accounting firms), that may serve to keep things in check.

But if none of those things are true—if Glass Steagall has been eviscerated, financing products escape regulatory purview, if financial institutions are selling off and collateralizing loans and if credit card companies are chasing fees (read transaction) instead of loans (read relationship)—then watch out. No one’s minding the business store.

In such cases, business becomes a combination of Russian roulette and musical chairs. He who gets in and gets out fast wins. He who stays is a sucker.

How fast is 30 minutes? How small is 30 cents? Small, and getting smaller.

Ode to Distrust

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Charlie:

You trust guys are taking over the Ethernet. You always write as if someone were arguing with you from the other side, but the distrust people are never heard from. It’s about time someone spoke up for distrust for a change.

I mean, if we didn’t distrust other people, we would all still believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, Hillary and the Republican Party! If we spent all our time trusting each other, a teenage child saying, “Trust me, dad” would put us at ease, instead of jolting us like an electric shock, putting us instantly on our guard to deal with a life threatening event, as it should.

If we didn’t distrust, the boss saying, “First, let me say that you did a wonderful job collecting for the United Way this year . . .” wouldn’t throw us into evasive maneuvers. And your spouse asking, “What are your plans for the weekend, honey?” might lead you to say, “Nothing, dear” instead of the more cautious, “I’m not sure. Jim hinted that he might dump a big project on my desk.  What’s up?”

We musn’t get so jaded that we give up entirely on distrust. Think of what it would do to the economy!

Think of all the unemployed diplomats, auditors and lawyers! It would hit the lower income worker just as hard with security guards, credit clerks, repro men and many others put out of work and left with inappropriate skills.

Why peace might even break out, threatening the entire military-industrial complex. That would bring our economy to its knees! And as the US economy goes, so goes the world’s. One might safely say then that distrust makes the world go round.

No, Charlie, don’t let the siren song of trust turn your head. If you got too much of it, trust me, you wouldn’t like it.

Ford Harding

Web Trust 2.0 vs Web Trust 3.0

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Thought leaders John Sviokla and David Pogue both posted thoughtful pieces about the role of trust in a wired, Web 2.0 world.

Pogue—technology columnist for the NYTimes—writes about the positive impact of (intelligently-moderated) blogging on the reputation of the blogging host.   Sviolka, Vice Chairman of Diamond Management & Technology Consultants, writes about The Madness of Crowds, focusing on the dynamics of reputation systems, and how the web enhances them.

They’re both talking about the web as a means of enhancing one’s reputation—but they emphasize very different parts of trust. Who’s right?

They both are, of course, but I’d say Sviokla focuses on what I’ll call Web 2.0 trust; Pogue is talking about Web 3.0 trust.

Sviokla’s subject matter is eBay, Amazon, and Motley Fool’s Caps. He sees these as more powerful in trust-creation than blogs, because, as he puts it:

The problem with Wikipedia, and blogs, and user generated content is that many of them don’t have a strong reputation management process. Put another way, any idiot can have an opinion. The most important thing is does the person who is giving an opinion have a good reputation? Is that reputation attached to his or her opinion? Does the person own the downside risk of the adverse effects of their opinion?

Sounds good, right? Though, as whimsically pointed out in Trust Isn’t Transitive by Peter N Biddle, just because someone can fly a 747 doesn’t mean they can be trusted to carry a handgun. And though I might buy a book from someone with a good reputation rating on Amazon, that doesn’t mean I’d introduce them to my daughter.

That’s where Pogue and Web 3.0 trust come on. Notwithstanding Sviokla’s critique that blogs are unmeasurable and don’t hold people accountable, they perversely have the wonderful ability to humanize. That’s exactly what people are—unmeasurable and hard to hold accountable. And a significant part of how we come to trust them is related to how much we come to know about them—in precisely those hard to measure and slippery ways.

As Pogue points out, when Microsoft lets employees blog, you suddenly see the human side of the firm, and the “Dark Side” gets a little lighter.

In my terminology (the Trust Equation—Credibility plus Reliability plus Intimacy, all divided by Self-Orientation), Sviokla is heavily defining “trust” in terms of reliability. Pogue is emphasizing the intimacy component—not on blogs alone, but in moderated commented blogs—Diablogs.

The intimacy factor is inherently richer, because intimacy is where risk enters the trust equation. People and firms take calculated risks in blogging: how much to moderate, how much to reveal, how close to the edge to get, how one makes those judgments; all these things tell us a lot about the writer, the blog editor, and the firm. Reliabilty says something very deep—but not nearly as broad.

Intimacy also gives us the bandwidth of exposure to assess other’s self-orientation. Are they in it for themselves? Or do they seem to care about me? And self-orientation, I argue, is the single biggest factor affecting how we assess the trustworthiness of another.

Does Google really mean it when they say they “Do no Evil?” The answer won’t be found in Sviokla’s reputation management systems. It will be found in Google’s willingness to let its people speak, from the heart, about what they think. And, seeing their hearts, we will know the judgment to make about whether to trust them.

Not just for book buying, but for introductions to daughters and the like.

Trust Based Selling in the Real World Case Study Number 42

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When the Beatles sang that in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make, they could have been singing about software development consultant Andrés Taylor.

Andrés describes himself this way:

"I am Andrés Taylor. I’m one of the founders of blueplane, a consulting firm specializing in helping software teams produce better code more reliably. I write mostly about the soft arts of team work."

He wrote some nice things about my book Trust-Based Selling. But what really grabbed my attention was his story of a recent sale.

Andrés mainly a technology person—not a sales guy at all. So it was with great trepidation that he responded to a customer’s request for a reference by putting the customer in touch with a past customer.

He got the old customer to visit the new-customer on the new customer’s premises; they got on well, and eventually Andrés got the feeling that maybe he should just leave the room. And he did. Abandoned the customer in the middle of the sales call. Didn’t do a close. Didn’t ask for the sale. Just left him with an old customer.

And of course, a happy ending ensued.

Read the post itself, it’s worth the click-through.

Here’s my take on what he did right:

  1. His decision to allow other users in tapped one of the strongest sources of trust: testimonials from others.
  2. His decision to use old-client as a case example is part of selling by doing, not selling by telling: giving a practical demo.
  3. His decision to let the old client client speak for himself—to the extent of leaving the room—visibly demonstrated:
  • his detachment from trying to control;
  • the fact that he wasn’t trying to control old-client;
  • his confidence in old-client’s probable answer;
  • his confidence in his own services’ abilities to speak for themselves through others.

 

But what really tells me that Andrés “gets it” is this statement in his post:

“My very explicit goal for every meeting I have is to listen to what they say, and try to find something that is a problem for them. If I can, I try to share some experience or knowledge with the person, that might help them with whatever they are having a problem with.”

That’s Trust-Based Selling at work. Trusting that in the not-too-long run, doing right by your customers ends up doing well for yourself.

And that’s not a Beatle song, that’s a business model.

Well, maybe both.

Bear Stearns, Enron, and Some Confusion About Trust

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Is there such a thing as an inherently trust-based business? Houston Attorney Tom Kirkendall, who writes a blog called Houston’s Clear Thinkers, seems to think so.

In a provocatively titled post called That Pesky Trust-based Business Model, Kirkendall writes:

"The fact of the matter is that Enron was — and Bear Stearns and AIG are — trust-based businesses that fundamentally depend on the trust of the markets to sustain their value. Once that trust is lost, such companies lose value quickly and dramatically. "

I’m not so sure about that. Presumably he means most financial businesses are leveraged—they lend out, or put to work, considerably more money than their base capital. And as long as people trust them, it works If they lose that trust, well, that’s when you get a run on the bank. That’s what I understand Mr. Kirkendall to mean, anyway.

But try shouting "roaches!" in a restaurant. What happens to Wendy’s stock price if someone finds a finger in a bowl of chili? What happens to a pharmaceutical company if someone finds a tainted pill bottle? What happens to a toy company if it’s found to have imported toys made of hazardous materials? What happens to a securities-rating agency when AAA-rated securities turn to junk in months?

I haven’t thought this through fully yet, but the idea that some businesses may be structurally more "trust-based" may be a distinction without a difference—or at least one of degree only.

What is clear to me is that all businesses can be run in a trustworthy manner—or not.

For example, when the CEO of Bear Stearns, Alan Schwartz, said on CNBC on the morning of March 12 that the firm’s liquidity was fine, a Bear Stearns shareholder might reasonably “trust” that the firm wouldn’t lose billions and implode in about four days.

Oopsie.

Back to Kirkendall, who goes on to say:

Although unfortunate for the owners of such companies, such a dramatic loss of wealth does not necessarily mean that any criminal conduct caused or was even involved in the loss. Rather, such loss is simply one of the risks of investing in a company based on a trust-based business model.

Granted criminality is not the only warranted deduction. There is also venality that hasn’t been outlawed. And, most common of all, garden-variety incompetence with its handmaiden hubris.

Here’s what mega-investor Saudi Prince Alwaleed had to say just a few months ago about former CEO Chuck Prince’s similar situation at Citibank:

You cannot come to the public and say that this normalization is expected in the fourth quarter and then three weeks later, not three months later, you come and say there is an $11 billion writeoff. This is unacceptable. That’s when the events changed completely. My backing was withdrawn dramatically.

You should never commit to something that you can’t deliver. Never…I am extremely disappointed with Chuck Prince and I believe that Chuck Prince let down the shareholders completely.

Both CEOs Prince and Schwartz said one thing, clearly and confidently—and were very quickly proven either liars or incompetents. Schwartz just got there a lot faster.

Alwaleed considers this patently unacceptable. Kirkendall considers it “simply one of the risks.”

But where is Kirkendall going with all this?

The sooner we all recognize and understand this risk — and avoid the mainstream media’s promotion of myths about them — the quicker we can put a stop to injustices such as this while advancing the discussion of how best to hedge the risk of such potential losses.

I’ll save you the trouble of clicking through the links. The “myths” he is talking about are that "myth" that Enron was about criminal behavior, rather than prosecutorial misconduct. Enron investors could have and should have shorted Enron (true enough). Kirkendall seems to think this is all part of a conspiracy, that Skilling has been unfairly demonized. He says, “I continue to hope that Jeff Skilling’s unjust conviction and sentence are reversed on appeal, not only for his and his family’s benefit, but also for ours.”

O-kay. That’s one view. Here’s another, from someone with standing:

Jeff was indeed the "smartest guy in the room" and a micro-manager to boot—which certainly made it clear to me that the idea that he was unaware of details of his subordinates’ affairs was utterly absurd. Likewise the idea that he was ignorant of the shades of gray and then black concerning the border between legal and illegal market manipulation insults his intelligence. So I guess I conclude "beyond a shadow of a doubt" that the prosecutors and the jury got it right.

That’s by Tom Peters. Tom knew Skilling because he worked with him. Read Tom Peter’s full post on Skilling, Lay and Enron here. It’s enlightening not just about Enron and ethics, but about what a real trust-based business looks like. Tom believes in Cowboy Capitalism. He also believes that those in charge bear some responsibility to those who entrust them with their money. Tom Peters, in my book, does Clear Thinking.

It strikes me as disingenuous at best to describe some business models as "trust-based," and to then use that as a facade for an argument against the accountability of those who are chosen precisely for their ability to navigate treacherous waters and who are paid handsomely for their doing so. If there is no line to cross, then there is no such thing as ethical behavior. And if there is a line, someone’s likely to try crossing it. C’est la vie.

The key issue isn’t whether a business model is "trust-based." It’s whether we can put our trust in the people running the business.

Customer Service Showdown: The Cable Company vs the DMV

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The stories you are about to read are true. Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent.

Wait a minute—there are no innocents! Let’s name names. It’s the New Jersey Department of Motor Vehicles vs. Comcast Cable.

And believe it or not, one of these is a wildly positive story about customer service. The other, of course, is not (lightning doesn’t strike twice in the same place, especially if that place is New Jersey).

Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to guess which story is which.

First, the disaster story—courtesy of my friend Judy.

Judy called XYZ about a common transaction. “Sure,” they said, “here’s what you need to bring, and we’ll take care of you.”

She gets there: “What? Who told you that! You need to go back home and bring the other thing.”

She returns. “You can’t do this, your ex-husband’s name is on the records. We need a copy of the twelve-year old divorce decree, plus his signature on a form. We don’t have that form, but we’ll fax it to you.”

Days later. “Who told you we could fax that to you? We can only mail it.”

More days. “We need to confirm your social security number.” She gives it to them. “Sorry, we can’t match it; we don’t have records of your social security number.” “Then what were you going to match it to?!" Judy asks.  We have entered Kafka-land some time ago.

At last, Judy leaves with the desired outcome. It turns out to be wrong.

On returning yet again, it’s, “well, who in the hell gave you that? It’s obviously wrong. Hey lady stop screaming—no need to take out your personal problems on us!”

OK, that was—drumroll—the Cable Company!  Comcast of West Orange, Essex County, New Jersey.

And that means—yes, people, believe it or not—the raging success story is the New Jersey DMV. Lately renamed the  Motor Vehicle Commission. 

I visited the Morristown office recently to register a new (actually used) car and change my address. I walk in at noon. The parking lot is full. I dread what is about to happen to my afternoon. 

But no; the lines are short—very short—and moving. I’m aggressively approached by someone who looks me in the eye. “Waddya here for, how can we help yez?”

“I want to register a car, and do a change of address,” I say. No hesitation. “Great, come on over here, let’s kill ‘em both off at once,” she says.

And she proceeds to do just that. She gave me practical advice: “If you don’t mind camping on a phone to Trenton for 10 minutes, it’ll save you a whole lot of time later—I’ll get you a chair. Meanwhile, I can download this part and fill it in for you.”

An elderly woman came in with an oxygen tube and a walker. An employee briskly walked her to the ladies room, then on her return, firmly asked someone else to move down to the next chair to make room.

A man with an accent said he was foreign born but naturalized years ago, and was worried sick about getting some documentation. An employee talked to him intently for 5 minutes; he ended up saying, “Oh, thank you so much, I am so relieved to find someone to help me with this, thank you.”

A woman next to me said, “I can’t believe how much better this place is than the department store I was just in.”

I sought out the office head before leaving to congratulate him on how different this office felt than others, and how much better than it used to be. “Yeah, we’ve got a pretty good team here,” he said, waving at his staff of eight or so.

Now, here’s the punch line. Which office do you think has bulletproof glass in front of the service windows?

Answer: the one who needs it.

Real World Trust-Based Selling: Case Study 10

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A few months ago I converted from Windows to Apple. It hasn’t gotten all that much easier than the last time I did this, about ten years ago. In particular, there are some nasty complications with Outlook, Blackberries and virtual drives.

In the midst of searching bulletin boards for solutions, someone mentioned a product called Crossover, by a company called Codeweavers. It sounded like it could solve my problem.

I looked it up and fired off an email to their support email address. When your computer is misbehaving, the desire for instant gratification is great; but it was SuperBowl Sunday afternoon—not propitious timing.

So imagine my surprise when I heard back from their VP of Sales in just a few hours. Not only that, but his email was literate, specific, directly responsive to my questions, and offered valuable perspectives.

He confirmed my fears in one area, offered a direction for a solution, and took care to specifically point out his own bias and company’s interest in the matter.

Bias? I didn’t care. Here’s someone for the first time in a week who clearly understands where I’m coming from, echoes my frustration, adds detail to the symptoms and the diagnostic of what my problem is, and outlines possible solutions for me. And all this on Superbowl Sunday? Gimme more!

And he did. We exchanged a couple more emails that same day, and more the following week. He was consistently helpful, including being very open about the limitations of the solution his company could provide. He offered perspective; he also offered up some customized service that he could offer in my case.

He was unfailingly polite and focused on my needs, even at the point when I reluctantly concluded that for my very specific case, I was going to choose a different solution—for now. It wasn’t his product’s fault, he was hamstrung by a compatibility issue with RIM, Apple and Microsoft.

What did this gentleman get out of our interchange? After all, he didn’t get the sale. I asked him that question, after thanking him for his (very big) help. And here’s what he had to say:

I truly believe that a salesperson’s best attribute is his or her’s ability to connect and build meaningful relationships with each and every person he/she meets. I’d much rather be viewed by clients and prospects alike as someone committed to them and their needs then someone committed to my company and my needs.

Here’s a real-life case of living the trust-based selling principles.

How’s his business doing? I don’t know. The product looks sharp and the company industrious. But that’s not why I know I’ll seek him out again, why I’ll stay in touch to see how his product evolves. It’s because he was so helpful to me in the first place.

And in the meantime, I’ll give him some well-deserved free publicity through this blog. Interested in running popular Windows programs like Outlook on your Mac? Call Codeweavers.

That’s not a plug—that’s helping out someone because they helped me out.

And that’s how it works.

Collaboration is the New Competition: Isn’t It?

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On the one hand:

  • This year a main theme of the Davos conference, where the worlds elites meet, was collaboration;
  • The buzz du jour—actually, for quite a few jours now—has been networking;

And yet—the lesson doesn’t seem learned just yet. In fact, business is positively schizophrenic these days. Three examples:

1. In Fortune’s March 17 issue, A.G. Lafley, CEO of P&G, talks about the major change he implemented. At one point he says, “I encouraged [managers] to compete like hell externally but to collaborate like family internally.”

A few paragraphs later, he says “we began to seek out innovation. Innovation is all about connections, so we get everyone we can involved: P&Gers past and present, customers, suppliers, even competitors.”

So, which is it? Do you compete with your competitors, or collaborate with them? Yes.

2. I wanted to hire my good friend John, a lawyer, to do some legal work for me. I told him I wanted him to be practical, not theoretical—and I needed good value for money. He replied, “I will focus on practical, and will be careful with funds, while also balancing the need to protect myself.”

Protect yourself? From whom, John? I’m the only threat he can possibly be talking about. So, what am I? A client, or a competitor?

3. The Wise Marketer , a group that focuses on loyalty programs, says in its newsletter of March 6:

“…by retaining 5% more of its customers, a company can almost double its profits… In other words, it pays to engender loyalty. So that’s WHY we need loyalty programmes – or more specifically, the data that we can gather from them."

Their words, not mine: the reason we have loyalty programs is for us to make more money. Loyalty—as in semper fi, or ’til death do us part—is engendered by business in order to make money—not for its own sake. Means, not ends.

Like Hugh Lofting’s Pushmi-pullyu, business has become of two minds.

On the one hand, the reigning strategist of our time, Michael Porter, teaches that business is about competition, that there are Five Forces of Competiton, and that two of them are about a company’s rivalry with customers and with suppliers.

By this view, the natural state of business affairs is a Hobbesian state of nature, where we fight with others in our supply chain. Made a lot of sense 20-30 years ago. So Detroit competed with its union, its dealers, and its suppliers.

Meanwhile, Toyota collaborated with its suppliers, and today enjoys a huge cost advantage because of it.

On the other hand, in a world where increasingly you have to get world class at one thing and outsource the rest, you had better get really good at collaborating with your supply chain—not suing them and having them sign NDAs. Collaboration is the new competition.

What is happening here, Mr. Jones, is that a Brave New World is colliding with a rapidly obsolescing business ideology. As always happens, the New World will eventually win. The only question is, how much damage will be sustained along the way. Because old ideologies die slowly, like old ideologues.

Business will have to re-learn the lesson of the human race. Survival does not depend on Darwinian strength—it depends on co-existence, co-location, collaboration. Darwin himself stated, if I’m not wrong, that survival depended more on adaptation than on overcoming.

We’re going to have to root out an awful lot of knee-jerk beliefs and behaviors based on the old-think of competition, in order to get to a more universally efficient and value-producing world of collaboration. It’s not so much an issue of moral illness, as it is of mental illness. We need to think anew, and aright.

Oh, and I’m still hiring John. It was his training, not his heart, doing that bad talking. It’s his heart I trust.

Carnival of Trust for March is Up

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The Carnival of Trust for March is up. This month it’s hosted by Duncan Bucknell at his IP ThinkTank blog.

What is a Carnival, you might ask? It’s a blogosphere equivalent of an anthology, in which a host collects of blog postings on a particular subject. The Carnival of Trust, unsurprisingly, collects what we hope are some of the best writings every month on trust.

Duncan has come up with some tasty choices this time. For example, read musings on topics like:

What if the post office ate your Intellectual Property application?

Why is a virtual community like a Koi Fish Pond—particularly with respect to recycling waste?

How can you build trust while facilitating meetings?

Can Finns trust the Finnish government to censor websites? (hint: probably not)

Enough with trusting your lawyer—can your lawyer trust you?

The cool thing about the Carnival of Trust (I think) is that each guest host (the host rotates each month) must limit him- or herself to only 10 choices; the Top Ten of the month. Secondly, each host must succinctly add value in their commentary—think of those great one-paragraph movie reviews in the New Yorker.

Do yourself a favor: click through to this month’s Carnival and enjoy some incisive, interesting writing, courtesy of Duncan Bucknell.

And if that whets your appetite, by all means have a look at past Carnivals.

Like to see your own blog posting in a future Carnival? Submit your blog entry here. Trust me, you can’t win if you don’t post an entry!

Next month’s host will be Mark Slatin, whose musings on trust and business are worth reading any day.

And if you’d like be a future host of the Carnival of Trust, write us at carnivaloftrust-at-trustedadvisor-dot-com