A favourite quote fell into my discussion with my son over the weekend.
" No man lives in the external truth among salts and acids, but in the warm phantasmagoric chamber of the brain, with all the painted windows and storied wall" - Robert Louis Stevenson.
It also appeared by coincidence on page 24 of Googled "The End of the World As We Know It " by Ken Auletta.It focuses in on Larry Page and Sergey Brin who resisted it seems the attempts by Michael Moritz the welshman from Cardiff and others to appoint a CEO at the beginning of the journey.
Trust is a big thing when growing a company or economy.But in Google nowhere in the three billion daily searches it conducts, the two dozen or so petabytes (about twenty-four quadrillion bits) of data it stores the more than twenty million books it plans to digitise do we so trust another company .Google has built itself so quickly it must trust itself.
Since Google's mission statement is "Don't be evil", and since the founder's letter which accompanied its share prospectus stated an ambition to "make the world a better place". Ken Auletta, is one of America's best business journalists, has turned his attention on the corporation, with particular reference to the challenges it faces. Many of these bear on the tension between the company's good intentions and the actual consequences of what it does.
In Googled, Auletta identifies one central, crucial characteristic of Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the company's founders they trust their judgement.
I like this definition of Trust- it applies to the best companies.
See http://trustedadvisor.com/trustmatters/
Where:
T = Trustworthiness C = Credibility (words) R = Reliability (actions)
I = Intimacy (safety) S = Self-orientation ( agenda working?)
Why is trust important to understand in our 21 st Century ? There are three forces driving the need to better understand trust:
- the world is getting more linked—we must deal with others more often, and better;
- horizontal external relationships are replacing vertical internal relationships—we are moving from a global managerial economy to an influence economy;
- the same forces that link us also depersonalise those links; links without personal connection are suboptimal; links with connection create trust and trust creates value.
Our understanding of trust is limited, fragmented and hard to access but the Google story is a good case study of trusting employees and it is apparent that the public trust Google to do the right thing because it creates partnerships. So I will change the above equation soon.
