Friday, January 7, 2011

Trust, or not?

At coffee this morning with the seasoned MD of a national retail chain we spoke of many subjects, including whether or not to trust others. It's difficult to get to your mid-40s in business without having been bitten badly. Earlier this week I spoke with an Operations Director who'd been cheated out of millions.

Interesting in the light of this to see the BBC covering the same ground today in the wake of WikiLeaks.

The article concludes with a quote from Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at F-Secure, who says "you really have to decide whether to trust a person or not".

This seems intuitively right: the strategic arms negotiators coined the phrase, "Trust, but verify."

Expect increasing recognition of the need to provide ways to do this in our inter-connected world where we often make connections or do business without the face to face meetings around which trust traditionally developed.