I am sick and tired of dealing with companies and people that don't do what they say they are going to do. I don't want to hear another excuse, story, explanation, or reason again.
Trust is what is missing in the world and especially in the world of business, and even more especially in the world of technology.
Trust is about honor, integrity, and accountability. There is no greater freedom than absolutely knowing that you can trust another person. Trust brings peace. Trust lets me sleep at night. Trust feels right. Trust feels good. Trust is being free from worry.
Being trusted is an honor. Being trusted carries a responsibility and with that responsibility, there is pride. There is dignity. There is self worth. Trust is human. Trust is transformative. Trust is care. Trust is virtuous. Trust is authentic. Trust is pure. Trust is sincerity.
Below are some excerpts from the book that I felt were pearls:
" Trust is the essential precondition upon which all real success depends. The key to trust is action, and, in particular, commitment: commitments made and commitments honored."
"The problem of trust has clearly emerged as the problem in human relationships and organizations. What makes most companies falter-leaving aside market forces, bad products, and incompetent management-is the lack of trust."
"Our aim is to help people build trust, establish trust where there has been none, maintain trust when trust is in trouble, and recreate trust even when it seems that trust has been destroyed."
"Trusting is something we make, we create, we build, we maintain, we sustain with our promise, our commitments, our emotions, and our sense of our own integrity. "
"Trust is not merely reliability, predictability, or what is sometimes understood as trustworthiness. It is always the relationship within which trust is based and which trust itself helps create."
"The freedom provided by trust is the freedom to think for oneself and speak up with one's ideas."
"Trust is a matter of making and keeping commitments, and the problem is the failure to cultivate commitment making.
"Trust involves sincerity, authenticity, integrity, virtue, and honor. It is a matter of conscientious integrity."
"The worst enemies of trust are cynicism, selfishness, and a naïve conception of life in which one expects more than one is willing to give. Resentment, distrust, and inauthenticity are the result."
"Self-trust is the most basic and most often neglected from of trust. Distrust is often a projection of missing self-trust."
"Trust goes hand in hand with truth. Lying is always a breach of trust. What is wrong with lying, in turn, is that it breaches trust. ...telling the truth establishes trust and lying destroys it."
"Authentic trust can never be taken for granted, but must be continuously cultivated through commitments and truthfulness. True leadership, whatever else it may be, can be based on nothing less."
Basic trust - we are all born with this trait, as infants we are dependent on our parents for feeding and caring for us. We establish a foundation for trust at a very young age.
Simple trust - unconscious form of trust better known as our default trust. A lot of times we trust people we don't even know because we have to, like it or not. When you go to the super market and the person at the register tells you it cost xxx, you trust that they have calculated the amount correctly. When we ask directions to a location when in an unfamiliar town, we trust a person we don't even know to give us correct directions. People who have been betrayed at one time or another refer to this trust as the "naive trust".
Blind trust - is a trust in denial. When somebody has been presented with facts showing their trust has been taken advantage of but continue not to believe the facts that are contrary to a one's personal beliefs, the person turns to a state of denial not accepting the facts. Blind trust is not critical and unquestioning.
Conditional trust - rarely does any trust exsist without some type of condition attached to it. A business person trusts that his fellow colleagues will do their work but would you trust a work colleague to do perform a medical operation on one of your family members? We trust somebody to do something and once this person has completed the action we will proceed to do something in return for that person. We see this type of trust in politics quite often or between parents and children sometimes.
We do not think very deeply with simple trust, with blind trust we are fooling ourselves into deception. As the author states, "Authentic trust is both reflective and honest with itself and others." Corporations and democratic societies that have authentic trust are usually more productive and profitable than those without it. Employees who are very cynical and parinoid have experienced some type of mistrust which is a good sign of a disconnect between employees and management. The ways to start to re-establish trust is to bring it out in the open with dailogue and define what trust really is. There mere fact of talking about it helps a group of people establish some type of base to start from.
Those who have read Dr. Flores et al's Disclosing New Worlds, in which three specific historical narratives offer examples of particular political skills in action, may be disappointed that there are no similar in-depth narratives here. I think the ubiquity trust acts -- we are in situations of trust/mistrust in almost every moment of our lives -- precludes those kinds of narratives.