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

Rating:
Summary: Establish or Re-establishing Trust in Work and Life
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Philosophical discourse, not a how-to manual
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Abstractions regarding trust but not how to Build trust
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: building trust - yes
Review: 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.