Rachel Botsman, Author & Trust Expert, University of Oxford sat down with theCUBE at Coup[a Insprie EMEA 2019 in London. #theCUBE #CoupaInspire https://siliconangle.com/2019/11/19/trust-is-money-in-the-bank-but-most-companies-are-leaving-it-on-the-table-coupainspire-womenintech/ Trust is money in the bank, but most companies are leaving it on the table For large technology companies, the success playbook has definitively changed. It’s not enough that these businesses win; how they win matters more. Unethical practices cost a company in many ways. A significant, but tragically underestimated cost, is damaged consumer trust. “And so, when the CEO sits there, I have to believe he feels the pain of the human consequence of what happened,” said Rachel Botsman (pictured), author of “Who Can You Trust? How Technology Brought Us Together and Why It Might Drive Us Apart” and trust fellow at the University of Oxford Saïd Business School. “But more importantly, I have to believe it will never happen again. It’s not necessarily, ‘Do I trust the products Boeing creates?’ It’s ‘Do I trust the people?'” Botsman, an adviser to companies around the world on how to build a trustworthy culture, spoke with Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Coupa Insp!re EMEA conference in London. They discuss Botsman’s provocative thinking on trust and why she encourages business leaders to view it as contextual and indispensable. Her perspective contradicts the traditional notion that trust is something built and difficult to earn (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.) This week, theCUBE spotlights Rachel Botsman in its Women in Tech feature. Why wise business leaders see consumer trust as money in the bank Botsman defines trust as “a confident relationship with the unknown … which allows us to overcome uncertainty, to be vulnerable, to try something new or do something differently.” Trust can’t be measured in the same way money can, but it still functions like money. “Money is the currency of transactions, where trust is the currency of interactions,” she said. A diligent company reflects on their company culture and character daily, ensuring trust is considered across the organization and in key decision-making processes. The upfront time and energy investment is worthwhile because “[if] you get behaviors and culture right, like the way people behave, whether they have empathy, whether they have integrity, whether you feel like you can depend on them, trust naturally flows from that,” Botsman said. Even when companies do value trust, their understanding of it is often counterproductive. On an episode of Botsman’s podcast, “Trust Issues, she describes this conception as her pet peeve. Addressing the distortion, Botsman shares: “when leaders and companies talk about we’re gonna ‘build trust’ … it makes it sound like it’s something hard, and it’s something physical, and it’s something you’re in control of. And, [it’s] something fixed versus something given to you.” Leaders and businesses, she argued, would be better served in seeing trust as something to be earned and assessed on an ongoing basis. Why business leaders cannot afford to be trust illiterate Not understanding trust as contextual, large technology companies can make costly decisions based on an overestimation of consumer trust. Amazon Key is an example of how this works, according to Botsman. Amazon Key is a service that involves an Amazon employee entering a customer’s home to leave package deliveries inside. Given the convenience and reliability of Amazon Prime, users may trust Amazon as an efficient parcel delivery service. However, these same customers are not likely to trust Amazon with home access. “I trust Amazon to deliver my parcels; I don’t trust them to [have] access to my home. So what we do with the trust and how we tap into that, it really depends on the risk that we’re asking people to take,” Botsman said. ... Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Coupa Insp!re EMEA event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Coupa Insp!re. Neither Coupa Software Inc., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)