“This is the type of person who would turn on you.” Even if the gossip isn’t about us, and even if we may be enjoying it at the moment or agreeing with them at the moment, we make a mental note that they are the kind of person who is nasty and says things behind another’s back. So I think it’s very dangerous. If you really think about it, a president’s job is not to unite half the country against the other half of the country. It’s to unite all 320 million Americans and find things that we have in common. There is a whole lot more that unites us than divides us. It would be so smart to build trust around those more common objectives. Two of those objectives that are pretty simple are the notion of security and the notions of economic growth and jobs. How you get there can vary, but I think having those as the big headlines and saying, “Let’s all unite around those. Let’s build metrics around what it is we’re trying to achieve. Let’s measure it, let’s have an honest conversation, let’s try things,” I think that would go a long, long way. I’ve heard people in the political realm say, “If you’re explaining, you’re losing, and the only thing that works is negative attacks. “We can kind of see it in John Kasich. He’s a guy with a phenomenal track record who’s kind of kept away from negativity, and he’s going nowhere. Don’t you think that says a lot about our sort of Twitter world, our reality TV world, with short headlines and short attention spans? I remember once teaching a junior high
for legal documents, policy manuals, and other prophylactic measures—the scar tissue of strained trust. Worse, when trust breaks down altogether, responses to the ensuing wreckage can vary from giving up altogether to grabbing power, from threatening to litigating. Make no mistake: Building and maintaining trust are hard work. Trust can be fragile. One bad actor can damage it. A single act of deceit can destroy a reputation for being trustworthy that was built over a lifetime. Be it in the boardroom or in statecraft or in literature—Hewlett-Packard or Caesar or Othello—betrayal is poison. Bernard Madoff’s investment firm and Bernie Ebbers’s WorldCom will forever live in the annals of capitalist infamy. There’s a good reason why being called an Iago is among the worst stains on a reputation. But if you live in a world of suspicion or selfishness, you may not even be aware that you and your necessarily low-trust teammates are like runners on a relay team lugging around heavy oxygen tanks in order to cope with the short supply of trust. You may not notice that your attention has shifted from the potential of posting a winning time to avoiding the risk of finishing last. Your energy is spent securing a replacement for the air you’d enjoy naturally in a high-trust environment. You look past innovation, optimization, and mutual gain in order to obsess over
school class, and I felt like every student in there was armed with a remote control. If they got bored and I didn’t get to the point quickly, they wanted to switch channels. It felt like I had to give them headline after headline after headline, joke after joke, and just entertain them. It was enervating, because we could never get beyond the superficial. We’ve trained our society to think short term. Stepping back, building trust, making connections, having conversations, showing respect, communicating clearly. Investing in trust is the only remedy, and I think it will take a real leader to do that. And unfortunately, I am not seeing much of that.
It does seem to be short-attention-span theater out there. It’s difficult to get people to read books or even read a longer article. JP: That’s right. Not too long ago, I read a speech of Teddy Roosevelt’s, the one he gave to the Sorbonne in 1910, where he talks about “the man in the arena.” It’s a phenomenal speech. It’s a 45-minute speech, and it’s so articulate. He’s chosen just the right words, and you know that he wrote it. Or if you read Jefferson or Lincoln or any of the great presidents, these were extraordinarily welleducated people who read. And now, it’s 140 characters and a dashed-off Tweet that is ugly about your competition. It obviously says more about us than it says about the candidates, that we would end up with those people at the top. But that’s where we are.
Like air, trust is invisible, and when abundant, it is taken for granted. But again like air, when trust is in short supply, people must find ways to cope. When suspicions arise, people reach for legal documents, policy manuals, and other prophylactic measures—the scar tissue of strained trust.
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