Trust Across America-Trust Around the World™

According to newly released data from the 2015 Edelman Trust Barometer the world has witnessed “an alarming evaporation of trust across all institutions, reaching the lows of the Great Recession in 2009. Trust in government, business, media and NGOs in the general population is below 50 percent in two-thirds of countries, including the U.S., U.K., Germany and Japan. Informed public respondents are nearly as distrustful, registering trust levels below 50 percent in half of the countries surveyed.”

“There has been a startling decrease in trust across all institutions driven by the unpredictable and unimaginable events of 2014,” said Richard Edelman, president and CEO, Edelman

Many global experts claim that “trust” is the issue of the decade and they may be right. Our society continues to be plagued by breaches of trust in business, government, academia, medicine, sports and the media, to name just a few.  But behind every trust violation is an individual or a team that has allowed it to occur. There is no doubt that low trust comes with hard costs to society and its citizens.

Is There a Silver Lining? Yes indeed. Many thought leaders are placing trust on their daily docket and teaching others through their actions and words.  On January 26 via TRUST! Magazine winter issue, Trust Across America – Trust Around the World will be releasing its 5^th annual Top Thought Leaders in Trust, recognizing approximately 100 global trust researchers, consultants, writers and/or business leaders. Today we announce 15 honorees that have been continuously recognized by our program for their thought leadership over the past five years, and are receiving our Lifetime Achievement Award.

Please join us in congratulating the following outstanding individuals:

Patricia Aburdene

Hank Boerner

Stephen M.R. Covey

Jed Emerson

Leslie Gaines Ross

Robert Galford

Mary Gentile

Bill George

Charles H. Green

Jim Kouzes

Linda Locke

Edward Marshall

Jeffrey Seglin

Frank Sonnenberg

Robert Whipple

Well done ladies and gentlemen!

Barbara Brooks Kimmel is the Executive Director of Trust Across America-Trust Around the World whose mission is to help organizations build trust. She is also the editor of the award winning TRUST INC. book series and the Executive Editor of TRUST! Magazine. In 2012 Barbara was named “One of 25 Women Changing the World” by Good Business International.

Our 2015 Poster, 52 Weeks of Activities to Increase Organizational Trust is available to those who would like to support our work by making a small donation.

Copyright 2015, Next Decade, Inc.

TRUST ACROSS AMERICA™ MONTHLY UPDATE JULY 2010

A close family member likes to remind me that “Slow and steady wins the race”…as long as you are heading in the right direction. Our VISION is slowly and steadily reaching its lofty goal as our trust ecosystem continues to expand, and collaboratively we elevate the discussion and develop solutions for building a more trustworthy world.

Over the past month we have spent much of our time finalizing our study on trustworthy business practices in public companies. Look for a major announcement in August and a special newsletter explaining our methodology and some of our observations.

Our core programs continue to grow:

• Our LinkedIn Group called Trust Across America launched in mid-April. It’s a place for discussion, dialogue and debate on trustworthy behavior in business. Most of our members are thought leaders from academia, consulting and corporate America in the fields of ethics, trust, reputation, leadership, integrity, CSR, ESG, sustainability and impact investing. If you have not already done so, please join the group and take a minute to introduce yourself. Please invite a professional colleague to join the group as well.

• The Trust Across America Blog for July includes interviews with Brian Moriarty from the Business Roundtable Institute for Corporate Ethics; Jeffrey Seglin, the NY Times Ethics Columnist; Karen Mishra, a Michigan State Professor who, along with her husband Aneil, has spent the past twenty years studying trust; and Tony Simons a leadership and management professor at Cornell, and an expert in business trust and integrity. I also wrote a few pieces on how companies can damage their reputation through poor marketing and customer service, and you can follow my fender bender saga navigating the auto insurance industry. Our blog index has grown to almost forty covering trustworthy behavior in business from various viewpoints including ethics, trust, reputation, integrity, sustainability, ESG, CSR and leadership. Click on link

• Trust Across America Radio Show: We had a surprise visit from Jeffrey Hollender of Seventh Generation on July 21. We continue to be honored by the outstanding thought leaders who have appeared, and will be appearing on the show. All past shows are archived, so you can listen at your convenience: Click on Show Link
Our guests for the month of August, all leading experts in various aspects of organizational trustworthiness, include: (August 4) Steve Farber, the President of Extreme Leadership and author of Greater than Yourself; Paula Marshall the CEO of Bama Companies, a Malcolm Baldrige Award Winner and author of Finding the Soul of Big Business; (August 11) Fran Maier, the founder of Match.com and the President of TRUSTe that currently certifies the privacy practices of over 3,000 websites; Traci Fenton, the Founder and CEO of WorldBlu, Inc., whose mission is championing the growth of democratic companies worldwide. WorldBlu publishes the annual WorldBlu List of Most Democratic Workplaces™; (August 18) Bob Schoultz, Director of the Master of Science Program in Global Leadership at the University of San Diego; Art Stewart, a consultant, educator, and purveyor of a strategic framework – the ‘New Responsibility Paradigm’; (August 25) Nick Andrews, Managing Director North America for the Centre for Sustainability and Excellence; and Karen Mishra, a clinical professor in the Broad College of Business at Michigan State University. Karen’s research focuses on how organizations build trust with employees through internal communication.

• Consultant’s Collaborative Our Consultant’s Collaborative is growing. It is another opportunity for experts to highlight and share their knowledge with visitors to our site, as well as serving as a centralized internal and external resource for consulting, media and program referrals. We hope to expand the Collaborative to include professionals with expertise in Organizational Trust, Leadership, Ethics, Integrity, Reputation, Accountability, Sustainability, CSR, ESG, Governance/GRC and Impact Investing. Special programs are being developed for those who participate through enhanced listings. Click for Consultants Page

• Reading Room Looking for a book on organizational trust? Our Reading Room should be your first stop. Books are written by experts from corporate America, academia and consulting. We added several new titles for August. Click Here to Go to the Reading Room

We hope you will choose to get involved and stay involved in some of the following ways. Trust Across America is a collaborative effort. We cannot do this alone.

• Join our Linkedin group called Trust Across America. We have also started a group on Facebook by the same name but have not quite figured out what we will do with it!

• Be a guest on our radio show.Refer a colleague to appear on the show. Please have them send an email to
Barbara@trustacrossamerica.com with their expertise and contact information.

• Link your blog to our site – Follow the format on the existing blogs at the link below and send it back in an email-we will add your blog within a few days.

• Be listed in the Consultants Collaborative- Please email me for more information on various listing options. (Barbara@trustacrossamerica.com)

• Suggest a book for our Reading Room

• Collaborate in some way we have not yet considered.

Thank you for your interest in Trust Across America. We look forward to continuing to build our trust ecosystem and in providing valuable resources to both individuals and companies. Please feel free to forward this newsletter to others who may be interested.

Barbara Brooks Kimmel, Executive Director
www.trustacrossamerica.com
Copyright © 2010 Next Decade, Inc.

Barbara: Tell us a bit about your background, qualifications and expertise. If you have written a book, please provide the title.

Jeffrey: For many years, I was an editor at Inc. magazine when it was still based in Boston. When I was executive editor, I noticed that a curious thing occurred with the letters we received from readers. Whenever we would run a story that highlighted how an entrepreneur had cut some corners or played fast and loose with the truth to get ahead, we would get letters from readers who objected to us featuring such behavior on our pages. We’d run some of those letters and then in the next issue we’d get letters from other readers who took those who had a problem with the practices we features to task and claimed it was how you had to behave to succeed and grow a company. We found something fascinating there and that led to my writing of several features that focused on ethical issues company owners faced.

Shortly after several of these features ran, I was offered a year-long fellowship at the Center for the Study of Values in Public Life at Harvard University. I had done my graduate work at Harvard Divinity School years earlier. I spent the year of my fellowship there running a seminar on ethical decision-making in business (largely attended by business and divinity students) and completing my book, The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart. As I began the fellowship in September 1998, I also started writing a monthly business ethics column called “The Right Thing” for The New York Times. A collection of those columns appeared in book form as The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today’s Business. I have also written about a dozen other books on writing, marketing, banking, and other topics. In 2004, “The Right Thing” column became a weekly column syndicated by The New York Times Syndicate.

Barbara: Trust Across America’s mission is to rebuild trustworthy behavior in America, starting with public companies. Is ethical behavior a component of trustworthy behavior, or are they essentially the same?

Jeffrey: Trustworthy behavior can be one critical component of ethical decision making in business. But ethical decision making encompasses a broad range of elements that result in a final decision. Ethical decision making explores how someone walks through a tough decision. Trustworthiness can be an important character trait and certainly one that should be valued in business. But it in itself does not guarantee that someone will do the necessary work of making an ethical decision.

Barbara: Is the “trust” climate in corporate America improving or worsening? What actions will turn things around?

Jeffrey: Hard to say. There is a great deal of skepticism about honest behavior in business that heated up during many of the business scandals of 2002. The recent issues of safety with Toyota and oil spills with BP have not helped restore the public’s trust. The vast majority of business owners may indeed be trustworthy. But a handful of high profile cases of bad behavior can wreak havoc on public perception. When things go wrong, business leaders need to address issues head on if they expect to turn the situation around. They must come clean and make right what has gone wrong. Given that by the time things go wrong few can agree on what will make things right, this is no easy task.

Barbara: It seems that ethical corporate behavior has frequently taken second place to short term stockholder returns. Do you see companies shifting towards long termism and greater emphasis on all stakeholders?

Jeffrey: Such a shift will only be possible if stockholders don’t demand short-term rewards. Given the impatience of the markets, it’s hard to see how this will turn around fast. But boards should take the lead here and do what’s in the long-term interest of the company and all of its stakeholders…even if they know they might take a short-term hit.

Barbara: Please provide contact information.
The email for the column is rightthing@nytimes.com. My personal email is jseglin@post.harvard.edu.
Jeffrey L. Seglin
www.jeffreyseglin.com
jseglin@post.harvard.edu
rightthing@nytimes.com
617.824.8240 (Emerson)

Do you have any questions about this interview? Please don’t hesitate to ask.