Bilk To Last

HOT READS FOR THE PRACTITIONER

Title: Honesty is the Best Policy – Unless You are a Fool, in Which Case We Have Come for Your Money

Competencies:  integrity, is trustworthy (organizational level), ethics

Who benefits: concerned people

Consultant Usage: useful background for organizational consultants and executive coaches

What’s it about? Doing research for this Blog often leads me to serendipitous finds.  This week I found a spate of books about trust between consumer and organization.  Are we feeling “had”?  If you can’t trust Corporate America, who can you trust?

Oh yeah, that’s right, I forgot – many of us Do Not trust Corporate American.  Too many people in the middle and lower economic strata apparently believe that the role of Big Business is to free us from our dwindling cash supply.

True?  Don’t know, but this spike in literature on the subject certainly invites wonder.  Interested?  Here are four newish (2012) books on the topic:

Extreme Trust: Honesty as a Competitive Advantage – How organizations can be proactive in becoming “trustable”.  Filled with helpful suggestions that most organizations can easily adopt.

Likeonomics: The Unexpected Truth Behind Earning Trust, Influencing Behavior, and Inspiring Action – “People decide who to trust, what advice to heed, and which individuals to forge personal or transactional relationships with based on a simple metric of believability. Success, in turn, comes from understanding one basic principle: how to be more trusted.”  The book offers a vision where personal relationships, likeability, brutal honesty, extreme simplicity, and basic humanity are behind everything. “There is a real ROI to likeability, and exactly how big it is will amaze you.”

The Fine Print: How Big Companies Use “Plain English” and Other Tricks to Rob You Blind – A soon to be released audio book (Sept. 28) from David Cay Johnston, who has been called the Defender of the Common Man.  The book could also be called Corporate Greed.  Or How the Rich Get Richer.  Expect some emotion (aka anger) in this audio.

Finance and the Good Society – The author says the Financial Community has failed us (now there is a novel thought) and that the road to redemption is not further manipulation of money or the management of risk but in the stewardship of society’s assets.  Now that’s a paradigm shift!

So there you have it.  A short reading list on the Honest Truth … as opposed to, say the Corporate Truth.  It is a reading challenge, but worthy reads for informed citizens.

Catch you later.

Bill Bradley

Bill Bradley (mostly) retired after 35 years in organizational consulting, training and management development. During those years he worked internally with seven organizations and trained and consulted externally with more than 90 large and small businesses, government agencies, hospitals and schools.