Customer Reviews

Building Trust: In Business, Politics, Relationships, and Life

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

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."

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.

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.

I have been studying both these authors over the last 15 years and. I find that the way in which Dr. Flores & Solomon have been able to speak about Building Trust allows myself and my buisness clients to begin resolving a nagging issue; "how do I trust others in my organization who I must rely on to get my work done?"

As Flores and Solomon say; it is a matter first and foremost of 'giving trust'. Many people approach their relationships, either professional or personal, such that trust becomes a matter of bartering. If you do this, I will do that and if we do this enough times we will begin to trust each other..but if you make any mistakes then we have to go back to ground zero and in actuality it is a negative ground, it can never be zero again..or, as in many cases we don't even try to go back we just say adios.

The practice of building 'Authentic Trust' is not a opaque and hidden conversation. Flores and Solomon understand this challange and the courage required when they refer to the 'cordial hypocrisy' that must be overcome within ourselves and our communities to build this 'authentic trust.'

For years, Vietnam Vets or others like us, lived in a country that could not talk about the 'dark side' or evilness of the war. This breakdown in trust, the 'cordial hypocrisy' which worked to cover this up, has been one of the causes of so much pain and loss of life even after the war. We did not see the importance of 'talking about trust' as a moment of building trust.

It is no different in organizations. The well being and livelihoods of our colleagues, our communities and our customers depend on each one of us. Sure, we can talk about the 'common sense' position of it is 'only a job' but in the end it is an excuse for not being involved enough, not having enough courage to be real about our distrust and for this we all pay the price.

Some of us who have been in those places in life, as Dr. Flores, know they 'have been betrayed or how they have betrayed others' but we had to learn about 'authentic trust' in order to go on. Maybe we can learn from them and the voices of our own relationships. We need to be honest, open and willing to give and build trust at the very moment we are 'betrayed.' This is a matter of virtue and not convenience. It is a self determined act of giving trust.

I applaud Dr.'s Flores and Solomon for their commitment to bring these matters forward as central for all of us.

A decent book that needs to be read carefully. The author explores the ways that we view trust from all angles. Trust itself is sometimes a hard word to define. People have different definitions of trust and the authors bring clairity into this subject.

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.

Good distinctions on trust, in particular the whole concept as trust as a "social practice," which includes the possibility for addressing mistakes and betrayals constructively vs. trust as a "solid thing," which can be fragile and thus shattered forever.

So many discussions on trust center on assessing trust "out there" (i.e., how do you know whether someone is trustworthy or not). The authors underscore the importance of being trusting and having self trust "inside" (an ontological state vs. an analytical exercise), focusing on the relationship as well as outcomes, and the transformative nature of extending trust into a relationship.

I enjoyed the discussion on entrepreneurship -- that the heroic individual entrepreneur can only be successful by working with and through entire "networks of trust." So many entrepreneurs fail because they fail to master the "practice" of building trust, relying instead on their own inventiveness.

I highly recommend the book and would have given five stars if the writing had been a bit tighter. For serious practitioners (organizational development, coaching, management consulting), this book is worth reading and studying!

When reading this book, suddenly I realized that the electromagnetism of relationships with great possibilities is trust. And I agree with the authors when they affirm "...talk without action leads only to distrust... But the essence of building trust is making commitments...making and honoring commitments involve precisely the same combination of words and action that builds trust." The book brought in to my conciousness this matter of trust, like gravity, is present only when we talk about it. It is written with the spirit to create trust. Inspires. Great book.

I am a big Heidegger fan, and it is refreshing to see an alternative to trusting that doesn't include game theory, cognitivism, intellectualism, and the like. It's great for entrepeneurs!

I was required to read it and participate in a discussion about it for an important class I'm taking which is why I read and actually did manage (barely) to complete this book.

In my opinion, the book could have been written in ONE single chapter. But these authors chose to reiterate the point over and over - and over some more - again, and again... you get the point! Each chapter was worth only a paragraph of writing if it had been written more succinctly, I thought.

What it really did was put me to sleep. It was like pulling the weeds in the yard in the dead of summer - it was such a tiresome chore to read this book!

Fantastic insight into conversations about building trust. A genuine approach to team building that alters the way people have conversations with one another!!