37 of 41 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
I was inspired., December 19, 2001
This book is not a prescription or a how to book; it provides rich distinctions that have inspired me to be a different observer of trust. My personal vision is to bring trust back into the business world; to build trust in business, relationships, and life.
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."
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15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Philosophical discourse, not a how-to manual, February 25, 2003
By A Customer
Expectations that arise from our cultural backgrounds may cause us to be disappointed that this book is not a 'How To' manual, nor does it provide a blueprint for building or skillfully posessing some 'thing' called trust. Instead, the authors offer a philosophical discourse aimed at: exploring the cultural backgrounds that produce our (mis)understanding of trust; observing trusting in ourselves and others; developing a more powerful understanding of the meaning of trust; and developing practices and other competencies that will increase our capacity to trust, allowing us to enter into more powerful and satisfying relationships.
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.
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15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Abstractions regarding trust but not how to Build trust, August 15, 2002
I kept re-reading parts of this book because I thought I had missed something. What I was looking for was some insight or actionable concepts about how to build trust -- which is what I inferred the book to be about from the title and from my previous exposure to the work and writings of Fernando Flores. I didn't find the practical advise I hoped to find.
On the other hand the authors make one point a number of times that dramatically shifted my thinking: trust can either be "earned" or it can be given. The titanic idea is that trust can be given to another in order to enjoy the new relationship that trust makes possible. In other words, my taking the risk to offer my trust to another makes many things possible in a relationship that might not otherwise be impossible. Unfortunately, even around that idea the authors offer little advise, examples, stories, case studies of offering trust. Nearly all the writing was in the abstract. Now I love theory but I also appreciate the practical application of same.
My memory of reading the book is one of feeling stunned by the lack of practical advise in the book. It seemed to me that authors crept up to edge but neglected to tell us what they saw. Inexplicable because both authors appear to be active practitioners of the theory that they write about.
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