Chapter 1: What is the importance of trust within organizations?
inside an organization, you have to have a lot of trust. People have to trust each other. And one of the stories we talk about in the book is the story of Uber, which went through a real crisis of trust, both internally, externally. The different executives were kind of at each other's throats and didn't trust each other.
Chapter 2: How did Uber experience a crisis of trust?
And they had the problem of the decision-making wasn't uniform. So we interviewed Frances Fry, who's a professor at Harvard, but who came into Uber to help them during this moment of crisis, moment of trust. The company was in turmoil and they had to figure out how to trust each other.
And one of the things she talks about is, you know, she basically took everybody for an away retreat and said, we're not leaving this room until we agree on what we're doing. Like, what is our strategy here? Because what was happening before this is one person would come to Travis with a great idea, convince him he would say yes. Somebody would come the next day, convince him of the opposite.
He would say yes. That kind of uncertainty is worse in most cases than making a decision that's slightly suboptimal, you know, like like completely whipsawing back and forth. So what are the principles that you need, you know, in order to build trust? It's fundamental to relationship. And in business, it's fundamental to actually getting things done.
And I mean, I think most of us have worked at some point in our life in a workplace environment that was in some ways toxic. And there was a low amount of trust, both trust between maybe rank and file and the management environment. trust between different equals in the company and things like that. And it's terrible.
I mean, some aspects of grad school were like that, you know, there were, you know, stories about people, you know, in order to answer this question, you needed to find this one research paper. And one guy hid the book it was in in the library, so nobody else could find it. And it's like, oh, my God, like, what is this backstabbing nightmare? Like, we can't tolerate this. And so Yeah. Yeah.
So you want you want a healthy culture in order to get anything done.
Well, so speaking to that, like, what did you learn in this process about building trust from zero?
Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, I think one of the rules, I think is rule number three that I always think is really kind of where I begin in thinking is have a good purpose and have a clear purpose. So with Wikipedia, it's very simple. You know, we're building a free website. high quality, neutral encyclopedia. Like that's the basic purpose of Wikipedia.
And it really, that purpose runs through everything we do, every decision we make, all the policies, all of like what the organization does.
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Chapter 3: What strategies can help rebuild trust in a company?
And without that, you end up going in circles. Like if you don't quite know what you're doing, And in many cases, you know, like a lot of business, like Airbnb, they had a clear purpose, like they knew what they were doing. And that really helps a lot. And then other organizations sometimes lack a clear focus and lack a clear purpose.
I mean, a lot of times, older, bigger companies that end up in like a conglomerate type of structure fail. They end up doing so many different things that nobody's quite sure what the point of the company is. And sometimes that works. It takes a hell of a lot of effort to make something like that work.
And oftentimes what actually works is spin out the division that's successful but has nothing to do with anything else in the company because it's just distracting everybody. But I think that that's one of the things, because once you have a clear purpose, then you start to have a metric by which you can make decisions. You know, it's like, what should we do?
Actually, it's one of the things I think is very interesting in my personal experience for profit company boards versus nonprofit organization boards. For profit company boards are much easier and much clearer in many cases, because usually in a for profit, you have strategic questions, all of that. But there is something that you all share.
And there is an objective, which is we need to be profitable. Like the company has to be sustainable. You know, we want to be successful. And that clarifies a lot of questions. Whereas in a nonprofit, it's like, oh, well, we're trying to share free knowledge with the world. But there's a lot of different ways to do that.
And it gets a little more complicated, even though I do think we've got a good purpose and all that. It still is often quite complicated. But every time you can come together on a simple purpose, then you begin to be able to make better decisions. But also you begin to be trustworthy. Like people know what you're going to do. You're predictable as a company. Yeah.
And that's huge for trust, right?
Yeah, exactly.
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