For The Better - Email 6/13

For the Better comes to you bi-weekly with ideas about how and why to build companies focused on human flourishing and stories of the people who are doing it. Other enthusiasms may occasionally appear.

The True Value of TrustIn this essay on AI and trust, Bruce Schneier also talks more generally about why trust is so crucial to a functioning society (it draws on his equally good book, Liars and Outliers). I particularly like what he has to say about the two kinds of trust we all rely on: "Interpersonal trust and social trust are both essential in society today. This is how it works. We have mechanisms that induce people to behave in a trustworthy manner, both interpersonally and socially. This, in turn, allows others to be trusting. Which enables trust in society. And that keeps society functioning. The system isn’t perfect—there are always going to be untrustworthy people—but most of us being trustworthy most of the time is good enough." We also, of course, interact with companies that we trust to varying degrees every day - and the fact that they do vary is a huge problem not just for society, but for the survival of the companies themselves. A huge study recently found that highly trusted companies outperform the ones with a low level of trust by up to a factor of four. By contrast, the ones that experience what's called a "trust event" (which at this moment in time might as well be a synonym for Boeing) fall up to 74% behind others in their industry on both value and market cap. We think of trust as something abstract that binds us together, but it actually translates into tangible value. Selling it off instead of protecting it for the long-term is an error far too many companies make (Seth Godin has a great, succinct summary of the problem here). We need to start treating trust like the asset it really is.Eric