Its Not Apple - Trust is the killer app

Trust is the killer application:
Paul Johnstone

Research produced by IBM concludes; "Individuals in higher-trust societies spend less to protect themselves from being exploited in economic transactions. Trust is an economical substitute for extensive contracts, litigation, and monitoring in transactions and thus economizes on transaction costs."

Lack of trust kills Organizations again and again. This lack of trust stifles innovation and productivity. Look at non competitive agreements. Most have been through the courts and appear not to be worth the paper they are written on. Time after time Judges have thrown them out of court. So far the only one not challenged is the 6 month non competition contract. The reason? I don’t know of anyone who has one or has been asked to sign one.

William Davies at the Institute for Public Policy Research published a ground breaking paper that examines the role of the government in the increasingly decentralised social and political activities taking place online.

He states there are three sources of trust: State, Community & Online Community. Notice the absence of corporations. He goes on to say that “out of nowhere trust has become the most talked about abstractions of our times” and notes that online communities have an unusual propensity to create environments of trust.

One of the most comprehensive studies of the open source community was conducted by Yochai Benkler to understand how Linux, a free operating system, and a raft of other Internet facing software products that have come from nowhere. They all challenge mainstream paid for products from Microsoft, IBM and others. Benkler concludes:

“Removing property and contract as the organizing principles of collaboration substantially reduces transaction costs involved in allowing these large clusters of potential contributors to review and select which resources to work on, for which projects, and with which collaborators.”

Microsoft formally has for many years acknowledged the threat from Linux to its revenues. It has even started to play this new game by releasing portions of its Windows code ‘open source’ style. I wonder why?

So how do networkers develop trust based relationships that counter the large company threat? If we don’t trust corporations why should people trust us?

The short answer is through B2B networking take time to develop trust based relationships with other people who will advocate for you. Develop and advocate marketing strategy to generate business year on year.

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