Why Your Clients Don’t Trust You – and How to Fix It
Do your customers trust you? Be honest, now, this is not an in-house survey. Do they believe what you say? Will they cut you a break if you goof up?…
S&P and the New Challenge of Integrity in Business
We've all read tales of corporate wrongdoing – think Bernie Madoff, Enron, LIBOR. In most cases, managers engaged in nefarious behavior, knowing they were doing wrong. There are a few…
Why We Don’t Trust Companies Part IV: The Solution
My last three posts – here, and here, and here – were about why we don't trust companies. To review the bidding, I've said it's because: Trust is predominantly personal in nature – a fact…
Why We Don’t Trust Companies, Part III – Risk
This is the third in a four-part series about why we don't trust companies. The final post will offer solutions. In the first and second posts, I said trust in companies is so low…
Why We Don’t Trust Companies, Part II – the Three M’s
Yesterday I wrote about three fundamental reasons that most companies aren't trusted: trust is mainly personal, most companies don't understand trust, and they make bad choices of tools to enhance trust. Let's…
Why We Don’t Trust Companies Part I
People don't trust companies very much. Sure, we trust some companies more than others, and sometimes we trust them more than government (sometimes not), but when you think of someone…
So You Don’t Have Time to Be a Trusted Advisor?
One of the more frequent comments I get in talking about being a trusted advisor is this: "We'd love to practice all the things you talk about, Charlie, we agree…
When You Can’t Get No Respect
Some will recall comic Rodney Dangerfield's catch phrase. Others may remember Aretha Franklin's iconic spelling, R-E-S-P-E-C-T. When you respect someone, it's a verb. When you get respect, it's a noun. Either way, it…
When Being Trustworthy Isn’t Enough to be Trusted
In sales, you sometimes hear, "They were pursuing an aggressive strategy – aggressively waiting for the phone to ring." In other words, sometimes you've got to take action. Much the…
Would Manti Te’o Trust Lance Armstrong?
King Kong vs. Godzilla. The immeasurable force and the immoveable object. The mountain and Muhammed. To these historic pairings, add Manti Te'o and Lance Armstrong, in the roles of trustor and trustee respectively. (For…