See Robert Porter Lynch’s Article on Trust Featured in the
European Business
Review

Announcing:
New for 2011
Based on Trusted to Lead, we’ve developed three new programs!

Trusted to....

• Innovate
• Negotiate
• Sell
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In the business world, we soon learn how expensive distrust is. Every transaction, every conversation, every move we make seems to be distrusted until we prove we can be trusted. Sadly, many say it's getting worse. Mistrust causes everything to be more complicated, slower, and far more fragmented. Distrust hurts our businesses, adding extra costs to everything. Just take health insurance – distrust adds at least 20-30¢ to every dollar of health cost, for which we receive no health value in return.

Distrust is an incredible competitive disadvantage.

What's more, distrust puts a major limitation on collaborative innovation, internal teamwork, and external our relationships with suppliers, customers, stockholders, and our community.
 

Profusion of Distrust

Trust in America is declining; the evidence is everywhere. Recent polls show that by a margin of nearly 3 to 1 we distrust the media and unions, and by 4 to 1 distrust politics and big corporations. Only 36% of Americans trust banks. The majority of Americans trust neither Congress nor the Food and Drug Administration. If distrust were a disease, we'd call it an epidemic.

The Importance of Trust in Human Evolution

Insightful Questioning is the “Lead Intellectual Arrow” and Trust is the “Lead Cultural Arrow” (in a quiver of multiple, interactive causative processes) of human evolution that direct the course of history, the fate of nations, and the destinies of people.

Trust is a key determinative factor in the creation of synergy -- the Holy Grail of the human spirit.

Trust has played a massive role in the evolution of society as a whole. When communities trust, people flourish, as exemplified by the Greeks and their Golden Age of Innovation.

And when trust is replaced with actions marked by high levels of distrust, societies decline, as evidenced by the Dark Ages, World Wars, and many African and Middle Eastern nations today.

For centuries, sociologists have thrashed the dilemma of why societies don’t evolve on an ever-upward path, especially given the seemingly limitless learning capacity of humans. Trust is the determinative factor in directing the ascendance, descendance, or stagnation of any social group, whether it be a family, a business, a community, or a nation.

One’s ability to trust prudently may be the most important social skill in humankind’s repertoire.