After the not-so-timely NJ Transit deposited me in Manhattan bright and early this morning I made my way with my good mate Vijay to the Harvard Club for the Trust Summit. This breakfast event brought together the authors (David Maister and Charles H. Green) of one of my professional services bibles, The Trusted Advisor, with the authors (Chris Brogan and Julien Smith) of a new-found favourite, Trust Agents. The first book concerns itself with providing perspectives on trust and ways to go about building trust, especially in relation to providing professional services. The second, more recent, book, looks at breaking the development of trust out to a wider network through the power of the web. To say they are complementary would be an understatement.

Now the reason for my attending this event, apart from being a fan of one of the authors (more on this shortly), was that trust is an essential ingredient in the innovation and product development process. This process, inherently risky, demands that people trust each other if they are to succeed. So, I went to also soak up as much as I could about the impact of social media on the ability to improve innovation and product team performance. I did not leave disappointed.

To say that this event was excellent would be a complete understatement. It began with the personal highlight of meeting David Maister for the first time, which I had wanted to do after having the privilege of providing feedback on his last book Strategy and The Fat Smoker. He was charming, funny and entirely engaging. Isn’t it wonderful when you meet someone you admire and they exceed your expectations? Apart from this meeting the additional authors, the excellent moderator, Robin Fray Carey – CEO and Co-Founder of Social Media Today and the 300 plus audience (all Twitter fiends save for one or two – get on it Vijay!) all collaborated to create a tremendous teaching/learning opportunity.

Each author was asked to speak in turn on the subject of trust. Chris Brogan led the charge and his opening salvo was the observation that, “trust is not new, we fell away from it due to mass everything (marketing, media, etc.) and treating people as an assumption – if we sell hard enough, they will buy.” He then juxtaposed this with the present where, “in the relationship economy relationships matter before the sale.” His reasoning being that if you don’t take the time to find out what someone needs, they’ll quickly go looking elsewhere resonated with many in the room.

Next up was Charlie Green who’s vigorous contention that metrics were often at counterpoint to organization effectiveness and the development of trust caused a general stir. It was phenomenal to see someone obviously passionate about a subject that they deeply understood. “Trust is personal and paradoxical,” Charlie noted, in that trust demands personal investment of time and energy to create and that, once created, it dissipates unless used. He also stirred things up further by stating flatly that, “We don’t create companies to (only) make money” and that those companies that are only oriented to the profit measure are negating a critical imperative to make the lives of their customers better. He also offered, “Don’t treat your customers and suppliers as competitors – to do so is suicidal,” as it fundamentally destroys trust with the very people you need for your success.

Julien Smith then approached the concept of trust from a systems perspective, “Trust is a system and social media provides multiple channels feeding that system. We just don’t know what signals are being sent through that system.” The trust system carries many signals and sometimes it is hard to know the impact our personal signals are having. And that in the absence of any feedback, we should not make assumptions as, “Silence without engagement in the social media domain can be interpreted in so many ways. Often mistakenly,” but that overall, “The risk of making mistakes with social media is worth the effort.”

Finally, David Maister shared key insights from his years of experience working with professional service firms. He dropped the blunt assessment, “Trust is scarce. There aren’t that many people who are trust-worthy.” And he then followed this up with reasons why he felt it was so hard to come by. “Trust requires you to be interested in other people,” and “becoming trustworthy requires effort, practice and active engagement over a lifetime.”

From the opening position statements the summit came to life during the audience led Q&A. The engagement of everyone in the room was phenomenal and the wisdom from the authors was great – truly emblematic of what is contained in the books that we were provided as part of the ridiculously priced tickets (only $25 a piece!) Perhaps the money quote for the event came when Chris Brogan spoke the timeless philosophy of one Vanilla Ice, “Stop. Collaborate. And Listen.” (from the immortal classic, “Ice Ice Baby”) For those present that was only one of many cues to build our own trust equation. Thanks to all for a great event and for the pile of homework (aka. reading) to follow.