Extreme Trust: Honesty As a Competitive Advantage Book

1 Trust: Not Just A Good Idea. Inevitable 1

Yesterday, Trustworthy Was Good Enough. Today, Only Trustability Will Do 2

Trustability: A Higher Form of Trustworthiness 6

Why This Book Is Different from Others You've Read on "Trust" 10

As Interactions Multiply, Trust Becomes More Important 11

Making Whuffie 17

But Hasn't Trust Deteriorated? 18

Our Goal Is to Help You Build a Solid Plan for Succeeding in the Age of Transparency 21

Sidebar: Basic Principles of Trustability in a Business 24

"You're Gonna Need a Bigger Boat" 24

2 Serving the Interests of Customers, Profitably 27

"You've Got Mail": The Wages of Untrustability 28

Banking on Customer Mistakes 30

Netflix: Bad Intentions? Or Incompetence? Or Both? 33

So What Are Good Intentions, Anyway? 37

Is Your Company Trustable? Or Merely Trustworthy? 39

How Companies Use Customer Insight 41

Empathy, Self-Interest, and Economics 43

The Social Role of Empathy and Trust 47

Psychopathic Capitalism 49

Putting on a Human Face 53

Trustability Test 55

3 Trustability: Capitalist Tool 59

Why Your CFO Will Learn to Love Trustability 59

Short-Termism: Don't Worry About the Long Term, IBGYBG 61

Taking the Long-Term View 66

Customer Relationships: A Link to Long-Term Value 68

Trusters and Distrusters 75

There's No Such Thing as One-Way Reciprocity 77

Trustability and Self-Interest: A Paradox 81

Trustability Test 83

4 Sharing: Not Just for Sunday School 87

Value Creation: Invented by Somebody, Owned by Nobody, Valuable to Everybody 89

You Can't Trust Everybody 94

Trust, Punishment, and the "Monkey Mind" 97

Death by Tweet 100

Cooperators, Free Riders, and Punishers 101

Trustability Test 105

5 Trust and the E-Social Ethos 107

The e-Social Ethos 108

How Friends Treat Friends 110

This Blog Post Brought to You By 116

The Kenneth Cole Affair 117

Trustability and Social Production 119

Sidebar: Influencing the Influencers 120

Innovation Thrives Where Trustability Rules 122

Trustability Test 126

6 Control is Not an Option 128

The Illusion of Control 129

Credit Cards, Biases, and Trustability 133

Social Relationships, Cocktail Parties, and Systems 135

Staples Sees a Good Program Die, Defeated (Mostly) by Chance 141

Unarmed, Nestlé Fights a Battle of Wits with Greenpeace 142

Facebook Learns the Hard Way 145

What Could Other Companies Learn from Facebook's Experience? 147

How Employee Autonomy Builds Trustability 154

Dealing with Unpredictability: Embrace the "Chaos of Community" 159

Six Strategies to Succeed amid Rising Chaos 160

Trustability Test 164

7 Build Your Trustability in Advance 166

Customer Reviews Are Essential. And Anyway, They're Inevitable 167

Sockpuppeting for Fun and Profit 171

Workers of the World, Blog! 175

Trustability as a Competitive Strategy 178

The Power of an Apology 182

Sidebar: Recovering Lost Trust 184

Letting Bygones Be Bygones 186

Cultures in Transition 189

Trustability Test 192

8 Honest Competence 195

Competence Is Related to Good Intentions 196

Product Competence and Customer Competence 198

Honest Competence Requires Honestly Competent People 204

Sidebar: Dear Abby 207

Self-Organization and Open Leadership 208

True Confessions: Domino's and the Transparent Pizza 212

Fallibility and Trust 216

Trustability Test 218

9 Trustable Information 221

Can This Information Be Trusted? 223

Science, Trust, and Evidence-Based Management 227

Intuition and Hunches in a Data-Rich Environment 232

Managing for Transparency 235

Trustability Test 237

10 Designing Trustability Into a Business 240

Imagining the Trustable Future 240

Trustability in the Mobile Phone Category 241

Trustability in Prepaid Cards 243

Sidebar: One Customer's Take on Rebates and Rebate Cards 245

Trustability in Financial Services 247

Trustability in the Automotive Category 249

Trustability in the Enterprise Computing Industry 251

Trustability in the Airline Industry 252

Is Your Business Trustable? 255

Can a Product Ever Be Trusted, Really? 257

The Technology of Trustability? 258

Start Planning for Trustability Now 259

Acknowledgments 263

Notes 265

Index 311