The Power of Trust

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From The Wall Street Journal:

Ralph Waldo Emerson is rarely invoked when people are discussing business and national economies, but he captured a nice point when he observed that “distrust is very expensive.” When individuals lack confidence in the quality and reliability of the products they’re buying—from meatloaf to mutual funds—commercial exchange is impeded and economic growth thwarted. It’s no coincidence that countries with high levels of distrust have high rates of poverty as well.

The U.S. experienced an episode of mass distrust in 2008, when collapsed confidence in the banking system sent the economy into a tailspin. Today, with the products and policies of major companies becoming ever more deeply integrated into our lives—particularly companies in the technology sector—there is ever more need for chief executives and their teams to build trust and maintain it.

That is the backdrop to “The Power of Trust” by Sandra Sucher and Shalene Gupta, a Harvard Business School professor and research associate, respectively. The authors provide an overview of trust’s role in business, drawing on academic studies and describing companies that have fostered trust, lost it or regained it. Their goal, they say, is to provide readers with a road map “to build, improve, recover, or sustain the trust of the people and groups who rely on you, and whom you rely on, to build a thriving business.”

That is the backdrop to “The Power of Trust” by Sandra Sucher and Shalene Gupta, a Harvard Business School professor and research associate, respectively. The authors provide an overview of trust’s role in business, drawing on academic studies and describing companies that have fostered trust, lost it or regained it. Their goal, they say, is to provide readers with a road map “to build, improve, recover, or sustain the trust of the people and groups who rely on you, and whom you rely on, to build a thriving business.”

The road map they provide follows a four-part design in which each element contributes to trust in business. The first part centers on competence, which refers to a company’s ability to deliver what it has promised. The next part takes up motives: Does a company have what the authors characterize as “good intentions”? The third part addresses means—“the fairness of your processes and treatment of people when distributing rewards and pain points.” The fourth part registers the “impact”—both intended and unintended—of a company’s actions on the consumers it serves and the communities in which it operates.

None of these elements alone is sufficient to achieve trust, the authors say, and progress in each ultimately depends on companies having their houses in order: “To establish trust with your customers,” Ms. Sucher and Ms. Gupta write, “you need to first establish it with your employees and create processes and standards internally to ensure your products or services are up to standard.”

In their chapter on competence, the authors lavish praise on the Ritz-Carlton, pointing to robust management training that results in its employee turnover rate being much lower than the industry average. They describe the company’s simple “Three Steps of Service”—warmly greeting guests, using their names, and bidding them a fond farewell—as a “brilliant piece of behavior engineering.” The motives chapter features an inspiring story of Tommy Hilfiger producing a line of clothes designed to be easily accessible to people with conditions such as muscular dystrophy and Parkinson’s disease.

But much of the book’s narrative focuses on companies that have lost trust. In the “means” chapter, Michelin is criticized for its move in 1999 to lay off 7,500 Europe-based workers in order to slow (or reverse) its erosion in market share. As for an example of the “impact” effect on the broader society, there is the tale of Volkswagen, which, in 2008-15, used software to cheat on emissions tests. The authors quote a European government official saying of the company’s actions: “We felt betrayed.”

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (This should be a free link to the OP. If it doesn’t work, PG apologizes for the paywall, but hasn’t figured out a way around it.)

While not necessarily directly related to the work of authors, PG thinks trust is an important component in the ongoing success of an author.

One of an author’s most important business assets is the group of readers who enjoy the author’s books and tend to purchase more than one of them. These readers may sign up for an author’s newsletters so they know when a new book will be released. Amazon’s algorithms are likely to point a reader who has purchased one book to other books written by the same author, whether already available or released at a later time.

PG will rely on the comments of visitors to TPV to provide more informed comments on this topic, but he thinks that reader trust will be enhanced by a consistent level of quality in the author’s books. Cranking out a potboiler may undermine this trust.

Additionally, consistency in the types of books an author writes, an ongoing leading character, secondary characters or a setting that appears in more than one book may also contribute to readers developing a trust that an author will deliver a new, but familiar general experience with a new story. Agatha Christie comes to mind as an example. Arthur Conan Doyle is another.

PG understands than an author may begin to feel emotionally or creatively trapped by feeling forced to write what seems like the same book over and over again.

3 thoughts on “The Power of Trust”

  1. Feeling trapped is the result of something I haven’t achieved yet: finishing and publishing the first complete project.

    It’s taking me a long time to finish it and get it right, and I don’t even know if I will continue after! I think so, but can’t see that far ahead, and have enough physical problems to make that a real question.

    Part of the indie problem in that department has been the number of authors who price their products at the bottom of the market, and then have to produce more, quickly, to maintain an income. Not sure that’s a sustainable business model.

    If I have trust from readers, it will come because the second volume is as good as or better than the first. My ‘sophomore effort’ can’t be a slump, or no one will read the final volume in the trilogy, and all those words will be for naught.

    • It’s complicated.
      First off, only a small percentage of authors–indie or tradpub– ever get to making a living off writing regardless of pricing. High prices don’t necessarilly result in more money for the author in either camp. Pricing elasticity is a real thing. So is “don’t give up the day job”.

      Second, those who do make a living get there by different paths:

      Some get a following of dedicated fans who value tbeir output and recomend it every chance they get. (Have I mentioned Lois Bujold’s SF stories are very good? 😉 ) The mythical “Thousand True Fans” is a real thing if hard to achieve. You just do your best and cross fingers and assorted limbs. Those that get there are assured of a minimum number of sales per book, regardless of how often they release, as long as they keep the customer satisfied.

      Others–a lot of indies–follow the mantra of DWS and KKR: write, write, and write some more. Get as much content out as quickly as possible. This is tbe Professional Writer path, as they put it. The content is expected to be good, else the strategy fails, but you don’t need massive sales volume per title if you have tons of books out and keep adding 4 or more each year. The Long Tail prevails. Again, not easy to achieve, but it does work. For those that can meet both tbe key criteria of speed and quality.

      (Tradpub works off a similar model, putting out as many titles as they can as fast as they can. Individual authors succeed or fail but the publisher wins regardless. It works fine for the publisher. Sometimes, even for the writer.)

      Regardless of the path, success doesn’t come easy, be it economic or acclaim.
      No silver bullet, no easy road to riches.
      “You place your bets, you takes your chances.”

      That’s all anybody can do in any business. Do your best, see what happens.
      Just don’t let expectations run wild. Not helpful.

  2. A few decades back there were bestselling writers like Paul Gallico who had widely varied books out, from Poseiden Adventure to ‘heart warming’ stories told by cats, to mystery/intrigue when ex Resistance notice more drug/crime than they like in 1960s France, and more. It worked then, why doesn’t it work now? OR does it, and I don’t notice because I’ve tuned out of big publishing? I’m practically certain it doesn’t, and Big Publishing’s desires to just have more of the same thing that sold last time are behind that. But I can’t back that conclusion up.

    He may not have boasted exactly, but I recall an intro to a story in a collection saying essentially: yep, it’s a potboiler, and people like it. so I write ’em. As long as a certain level of quality is kept up I wish authors who can have that range of ideas would try writing them. It would certainly solve that trapped feeling PG mentioned.

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