Among the distractions while reading Smart Trust are the boxes that pop up unexpectedly through the text, giving us verbatims of the authors’ experiences. One of Stephen Covey’s is unintentionally apposite. “I remember a time when I was travelling with my parents. We visited a less developed country that was known to be corrupt. We hired a driver we thought we could trust to take us to several places, and we left a number of watches and other gifts we had purchased in our bags locked in the trunk of his car while we did some sightseeing. When we returned we checked inside our bags to make sure the boxes were all there. They were. But when we got back to the US and opened the boxes, we discovered they were all empty.” An unwary reader might misplace trust equally erroneously in buying this book. The cover of the book sports “Stephen M R Covey” in a font and style that, to the trusting glance, conveys the book has the “Stephen R Covey” of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People as its author. Serves you right if you didn’t notice the additional “M” that distinguishes the son from the father. After all, this book is supposed to teach you to be smart about trusting.
The central messages of the book, that trust is vital, that we need to find the middle path between blind trust and distrust, and that the process needs to start with oneself, are fairly uncontroversial, if prosaic. Did they need 250+ sleep-inducing pages to convey? A drowsy but emphatic “no”.
To fill the pages, Covey and Link have pulled examples that range from relevance, through stretched relevance, to glancing at the cover to check what book you are reading. I am still scratching my beard to figure out how a recommendation about paying bribes to customs officials, which had to go up to Azim Premji’s desk before being turned down, exemplifies trust in Wipro. My beard has it easy. Ai Weiwei will pull his out when he reads the glorification of China as the exemplar of states that trust their citizens! And what will Swiss car drivers do to their hair when they discover they are equated to drivers in Bangalore with regard to signalling their intent on the road? And, to prevent you from putting too much trust in the examples, there is a liability-limiting disclaimer: “… we can confidently predict that some of the illustrations in this book will be turned upside down.”
If we can’t trust the examples, are we better off trusting the research? Again we come up against the relevance barrier. There is a neat graph plotting GDP per capita against Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index (no prizes for guessing where India places on both), but what is the direction of the causal connect between these variables, and how does trust become an antonym for corruption? There are no superscripted numbers for referencing the research in the notes. Instead, there are page numbers in the notes and you have to search through the entries (fortunately, not too many) for each page number to find the right note.
If note reference is an irritant that only affects the no(te)sy, there is another that plagues every reader. Like a pair of amateur skeet-shooters using diffusion chokes, Covey and Link pepper the entire book with quotations widely scattered around the target of trust. This is fine if you bought Smart Trust as a compendium of quotations on trust (couldn’t you have just Googled?), but if you were looking for a reasoned argument on the subject, these quotations, and the annoying sidebars that highlight them, disrupt your attention. Assuming, of course, the book deserves or demands concentration. As an example of the intellectually taxing logic of the book, here are the three justifications for the question “Why Is Extending Smart Trust Smart?”:
(1) Extending smart trust produces results.
(2) Extending smart trust increases trust.
(3) Extending smart trust generates reciprocity.
True, the sanctimonious sermons are relieved by flashes of humour, but they are all provided by Scott Adams, whose cartoons are also interspersed through the book. One which I particularly enjoyed shows an executive coming into Dilbert’s cubicle, where there is a spare chair:
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Executive: May I borrow your chair for a meeting?
Dilbert: Ok but leave your wallet, keys, company ID and one shoe with me.
Executive: I’m your Chief Financial Officer.
Dilbert: Then I also need your PDA and one sock.
Unfortunately, the eight to 10 Dilbert cartoons cannot take on the entire burden of holding the reader’s interest. This reviewer recommends the publishers should apply to the Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation for approval before selling more copies of Smart Trust. Such strong soporifics are covered under schedule H and should be sold only with a medical practitioner’s prescription.
The reviewer is CEO, Banner Global Consulting
SMART TRUST
Creating Prosperity, Energy, and Joy in a Low-Trust World
Stephen M R Covey and Greg Link
Simon & Schuster 2012;
296 pages; Rs 599