August 20, 2025 • 58 mins
What does it really take to build and keep trust?
Jon Goehring, Coach Jim Johnson, and Dr. Rehnuma Karim welcome Dr. Yoram Solomon — author of The Book of Trust and Can I Trust You? mini books, entrepreneurship expert, and host of The Trust Show podcast — for a no-nonsense conversation dissecting the complex nature of trust in leadership, sales, and life. Yoram reveals eight fundamental laws of trust — from its continuous, personal, and asymmetrical nature to the power of transferability and reciprocity.
He demolishes common myths about leadership, showing why promoting your best individual contributor rarely produces the best leader. Instead, he stresses empathy, transparency, and tailored accountability for building cultures of trust and performance.
Key takeaways include:
Resources Mentioned:
Jon Goehring, Coach Jim Johnson, and Dr. Rehnuma Karim welcome Dr. Yoram Solomon — author of The Book of Trust and Can I Trust You? mini books, entrepreneurship expert, and host of The Trust Show podcast — for a no-nonsense conversation dissecting the complex nature of trust in leadership, sales, and life. Yoram reveals eight fundamental laws of trust — from its continuous, personal, and asymmetrical nature to the power of transferability and reciprocity.
He demolishes common myths about leadership, showing why promoting your best individual contributor rarely produces the best leader. Instead, he stresses empathy, transparency, and tailored accountability for building cultures of trust and performance.
Key takeaways include:
- The critical mindset shift from blame to growth through vulnerability and honest self-assessment
- Why trust is relative and personal — no one can please everyone
- How transferable trust works to open doors and deepen relationships
- Building alignment through shared values as the #1 predictor of trustworthiness
- Practical strategies for leaders and team members to earn and nurture trust daily
- Evaluating ideas with honest detachment and not falling in love with your solution
- The vital role of face-to-face interaction over LinkedIn or email in building authentic trust
Resources Mentioned:
- The Book of Trust & Mini Books Series — yoramsolomon.com | trusthabits.com
- Can I Trust You? Podcast — The Trust Show
- Upcoming book: Is It Really a Great Idea?
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This podcast is a proud member of the Teach Better
podcast network, Better Today, Better Tomorrow, and the podcast to
get you there. You can find out more at Teechbetter
dot com slash podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Why should you be a leader? One of the questions
we never asked. We're becoming leaders because we look at
leadership as a promotion, not a profession. Leadership is a profession.
Trust your people just a little more than you believe
they earn. They need to fill this little gap of you,
(00:32):
trusting them slightly ahead of what they believe they earn
and deserve. Never fall in love with your idea or
with your solution. Always fall in love with the problem
or the pain that you're addressing.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
Do you want to be a leader in a constantly
changing world? Our emerging leaders look different, come from various
backgrounds and from all different age groups. Leadership is changing
and it's hard to keep up.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
But the good news you can be a leader too.
Speaker 3 (01:03):
You can be an emerging leader. Welcome to the Limitless
Leadership Lounge, a try generational conversation for emerging leaders. Come
spend some time with us to discuss leadership from three angles.
The Coach Jim Johnson, the Professor, doctor Reneuma Kareem, the host,
John Gering a monthly guest, and you get in on
(01:25):
the conversation on Facebook and Instagram and be sure to
follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Speaker. So come
on in and make yourself comfortable.
Speaker 4 (01:34):
Back for another week of the Limitless Leadership Lounge. This
is what we call a try generational conversation for you,
the emerging leader. So whether or not you're checking us
out right now on any of the audio platforms or
up on YouTube, we appreciate you having us on today
because we're going to dive into some more leadership insights,
especially surrounding entrepreneurship and trust. Excited for our conversation today.
(01:56):
I'm joined as always by doctor Numa Kareem and coach
Jim Johnson and co which is going to welcome our
guests today. So go write ahead, coach and let's dive in.
Speaker 5 (02:04):
Yeah, we're really excited. I got a chance to talk
to doctor Joram Solomon and he has got a lot
to offer our audience today, So just give you a
little bio on him. He's got a lot in his bio,
but I'm going to cut it down. Is the author
of the book of trust and by the way, he
sent me the mini Book of Trust that I read
and recommended my network as a really good book and
(02:26):
the most comprehensive book ever written about trust, the book
series Can I Trust You? And the host of the
Trust Show podcast. He has published a total of twenty books,
although he is now almost done with his twenty first book,
so we're looking forward to that and we'll get into
a little bit about that book in our interview. And
has written also more than four hundred articles on trust, innovation, culture,
(02:51):
and entrepreneurship. Orm holds a PhD in organization and management,
an MBA, a law degree, and an engineering degree. And
how you got all that? Because if I got all those,
I'd be into my grave, So I don't have congratulations.
He's an adjunct Professor of Entrepreneurship, a three time ted
X speaker, a former executive, elected official, pilot, and a
(03:13):
member of the Israel Israeli thirty fifth Airborne Brigade. Through
his keynotes, workshops and teachings, known for his no bs
style of telling you what you need to hear and
now what you think you want to hear, without further
adore your Solomon. Welcome to the Limitless Leadership Lounge.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
Thank you coach. Great to be with you from Stormy, Texas.
Speaker 5 (03:39):
Well, we all three of us now. Doctor Kareem is
back in Rochester and we're we do have sunshine, but
it's about forty five degrees, so we're a little bit
chillier than will be.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
I'll take it so well.
Speaker 5 (03:54):
I got to say to you, I know trust is
something you spend a lot of time research, and can
you talk some about your eight laws of trust? If
you could share those and maybe delve into one or
two of them because trust is so essential in building
as a leader.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
No, I'm not going to talk, Okay, I will so
you know. The funny thing is, I did not invent
those eight laws of trust. I did not make them up.
I did not create them. I observed them. Ever since
I started working on my own PhD research back in
two thousand and eight, I started observing the ways trust behave.
And I'll tell you something, I would not have committed
(04:36):
to the topic of trust if it wasn't for realizing
that I see something different, different than what most people.
Most people look for, so kind of in a very
high level, what are the eight laws? First? Trust is continuous.
It's not I trust you or I don't trust you.
It's not binary. It's continuous. Second, it's contextual. Third, it's personal.
(05:00):
This is the same behavior that would cause one person
to trust me could cause another person to distrust me. Fourth,
it's asymmetrical. The level of trust that I have in
you does not reflect on the level of trust that
you have in me. Those are completely different things based
on completely different independent bearable number five. Trust is transferable.
(05:23):
If I trust you Jim, and you trust John, then
I will trust John. Maybe not to the same extent
I trust you or you trust him, but more than
nothing because you said something about him, You said you
can trust him. It's transferable. It is reciprocal. When I
say reciprocal, let's not confuse that with a with symmetrical.
(05:43):
When I say reciprocal, it's not that if I trust you, you
will trust me. It's if I trust you and I
show you that I trust you, you will behave in
a more trustworthy way, because otherwise you feel this cognitive
dissonance of a feeling that you're trusted by someone but
not believing that you earned the trust. You're going to
(06:03):
work on earning that trust. Number seven. Trust is dynamic.
It changes all the time. There is no fixed level
of trust. I may trust you at a certain level
right now and a different level later. And finally, trust
is two sided. It is the level of trust that
I have in you, John for example, is the product
(06:26):
of your trustworthiness and my trustfulness. It's my willingness to
trust people in general, or your kind of people. I
don't know radio personalities, for example, in still in general.
So you may be the world's most trustworthy person, and
I'm still not going to trust you. And it's not you,
(06:48):
it's me, which is like the last thing you say
before you break up with someone. It's not you, it's me,
But it is. It's a part of my trustfulness. Now.
I know. I went through eight laws, and it's kind
of you're trying to remember them than other than reading
them in the book. I decided. Somebody told me when
I joined the National Speakers Association that if you want
(07:10):
to make people remember something, you need to give them
an acronym. And if you give them an acronym, it's
going to be easier to remember. So remember, trust is continuous, contextual, personal, asymmetrical, transferable, reciprocal, dynamic,
and two sided. So I made an acronym. It's kok Patro.
So if you are trying to remember, just remember patro
(07:33):
and it's all going to come back to you.
Speaker 4 (07:36):
Man. And so you, uh, it's so funny because we
think of like catchy acronyms, but sometimes you have to
adjust words and phrases to fit yourself into that catchy acronym. Right,
But you're just like, let's tell it like it is.
And I love that about about that. So, yes, you
(07:56):
got to get the book, though, you got to get
the book to dive into each one of them. Some
of those I think come fairly intuitively to us, but
there are others that I feel like people might want
to delve into a little bit more.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
What are one or two.
Speaker 4 (08:10):
Of those that you feel like we're not doing a
good enough job of grasping.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
Okay, so the first one is I mentioned the trust
is personal. So I'll give you an example. So you're
an adjunct professor yourself, and are you familiar with the
website called rate my Professors. Yes, unfortunately, there don't go there,
trust me, don't go there. But so one day my
younger daughter, she was in college, and she was signing
(08:39):
up her classes and I saw her going to that
website Rate my Professors, and I'm like, what is that website?
She said, oh, other students anonymously because we don't want
to actually say who we are when we're going to
give that kind of review. Anonymously posted reviews about professors,
so I can look them up decide if this is
(09:00):
a professor I want to sign up to. And I'm
thinking this is brilliant. But wait a minute, I'm a
professor at SMU. Do I have a page on Rate
my Professor's because I didn't make one. So I go
there and sure enough, my name is there, and there
is a web there is a site, and I went
there and the first review said something like doctor Som
(09:23):
Professor Solomon is awesome if you want to learn entrepreneurship.
He gives great feedback and so on. I'm awesome. Just
so that you know. And now do you think that
I'm telling you this to brag, Well, actually that's my
main reason, but no, and I'm not trying to brag.
I'm not trying to recruit you to my class CISB
(09:44):
sixty to twenty six. But the reason is and get
ready for some vulnerability. By the way, vulnerability is very
connected to trust. I can sense this is going to
be a next question. Never mind, get ready for some
vulnerability for me. Don't worry. The next review he's how
(10:06):
did it say it? It said something like his attitude
is arrogant, condescending, but he's a good grader, which we
know is the most important part in college, right in
the college class. And I'm looking at this, and here's
the thing that came right after a semester where I
(10:26):
only taught one class that semester. This was in twenty nineteen,
so it's before COVID. It's not over zoom. This was
in a classroom. This had to And the two reviews
came ten days apart. So these were two students that
set at the same classroom at the same time, in
the same class. I was the same person. How come
(10:48):
one of them gives me five out of five and
says I'm awesome. The other one gives me one out
of five and says I'm awful. Well. Trust is personal,
and different people see different things in you. Different people
care about different things, different people prioritize different things. I mean, today,
(11:09):
if you think about our political division that we have,
just knowing that you're a member or a supporter of
the other party, is good enough for me not to
trust you or for other people not to trust me.
I'll tell you upfront that when I vote, I voted
for candidates from both major parties in every election because
(11:34):
I care about the person, not about the party. I'm
not a good representation of everyone here. So the same behavior.
What I found was that the same behavior that I
did in the classroom, for example, that could cause one
person to trust me or to give me five out
of five and say that I'm awesome, the same behavior
(11:55):
would cause another one to say that I'm awful, give
me one out of five and not trust me. So
that's one very different perspective I have on trust. That
trust is relative. It's personal, but it's relative. It's not absolute.
It's not universal. There is no set of questions or
checkboxes that if you can check all of them, you're
(12:16):
going to be trusted by all people. To remember, back
in nineteen seventy two, there was a pull of the
most trusted men in America. I'm sorry, Ranuma, the most
trusted men in America, that's what they said. And they
were looking for governors, and I think it was yeah,
it was presidential candidates and all, but they threw in
(12:37):
TV anchors and sure enough, Walter Cronkite came out as
the most Trusted men in America. CBS used it for years,
the most Trusted Men in America. Even he got seventy
two percent of the vote, not one hundred percent. So
that's one thing. Trust is relative. I know, we would
(12:58):
rather have a checklist of things that if we can
check all of them, you trust that. If you can't,
you're not. But it's not. What's true for GM is
not true for you can't please ever get one the
second one. You wanted me to give you two. The
second one is number five. That trust is transferable and
I found that. So my twentieth book is actually called
(13:20):
The Trust Premium, which I can also see from my
logo here, and that is focused on the relationship between
a salesperson, a professional selling services to a customer. Because
with the level of trust, with the level of freaks
marketing and sales trincs use today to lure you to
(13:41):
you know, Baden's Switch and everything else, trust is the
only differentiator. And so now the question is what causes
your customer to trust you and what I found was
that transferable trust plays a major role. Right now, I'm
in the middle of a project to replace windows in
my house. How did I find the contractor? Did I
(14:03):
go online to search?
Speaker 3 (14:04):
No?
Speaker 2 (14:05):
I asked my friends. I ask people that I trust,
who do you recommend? Before that we need the remodeling
for the pool? How did I find the contractor for that?
I ask friends who remodeled the pool to recommend someone.
So the transferable trust is a key part of trust
and it's only getting bigger.
Speaker 6 (14:24):
And Doctor Solomon, among your six components of trustworthiness, you
mentioned like we need to know beforehand before to interact,
and if I want to form a relationship or if
I want to have a business, I want to know
that person beforehand. And nowadays a lot of young people
are starting different businesses, different entrepreneurship projects, but often there
(14:50):
are investors who do not trust them. So what would
be your advice to some of them? How do they
build that profile to gain that trust ahead so that
it's easier for them to communicate.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
So that's a great question, and we'll start with you
mentioned the six components of my trust model, So just
to bring it in here, there are three components that
I consider to be who you are. Those are the
three that you want to know ahead of a meeting.
So this is what I know about you before we met.
So you told me before we started that you checked
(15:30):
me out. You went to my online presence, You looked
at some of my articles, you read all four hundred
and something of them. You made it, okay, you know
you didn't, but you didn't read of my twenty books.
But there was enough there to establish three things. One
and those are the three components. Competence. We're interviewing somebody
who's competent. Number two, personality compatibility. From what I see,
(15:55):
we are kind of aligned in our priorities, in our values.
By the way, in my research, one of the things
that I found was that the number one factor that
affects trustworthiness is the level of shared values that we have.
If we share values, there is an eighty six percent
correlation that I found between that and trustworthiness. Number three
(16:15):
is symmetry, the symmetry of our relationship. And I'm not
gonna dig too deep into that, but you know, a
very famous astronaut by the name of Jeff Bezos said
that your brand is what people say about you when
you're not in the room, so it's really important that
you establish those things. Now. I do want to finish
(16:38):
that with one little piece of advice, because you talked
about investors and entrepreneurs, young entrepreneurs who are just starting.
I'll give you advice that I give all of my students,
my students. You know, we're in the age of text
and email and Instagram and snapchat and everything, and it's
(16:59):
very easy to send an email right, a lot easier
than to have a talk. And so what I get
from a lot of students is, first, here is my
business plan. Let's schedule a time to talk. And what
I tell them is, never ever let your business plan
(17:20):
hold the first meeting with the investor. Never let your
business plan hold the first meeting with the investor, because
if there's anything that's left open there, the investor makes assumptions.
If this is not written the way you think it's written,
the investor makes assumptions. If you didn't put a dot
(17:42):
or a comma in the right place, the investor makes assumptions.
Do you want them to make assumptions or do you
want them to first see you get your passion, understand,
ask questions, and get them answered because you're there, or
do you want a piece of paper? Do the talking
(18:04):
for you the first talking, so you know when I
talk about the I talked about the three components you
want to know before the meeting. But there are three
components of what happens during the meeting. One of them
is your positivity, made of two things no bs, attitude
and empathy. Can you put yourself in there? Can you
see things from their perspective? Those are accelerated by the
(18:26):
two other components, time and intimacy. Intimacy goes back into
the business line. Is an email, is a document? Intimacy
is seeing the other person, seeing the white of their eyes. Time.
The longer we spend time together, the more we build
or destroy trust, depending on our personality compatibility. Well, our
(18:51):
brain needs a certain amount of information to feel safe.
If we don't have that information in the form of facts,
what do we do? We make assumptions. The first impression
is so important. Don't let the businessman make the first impression.
Speaker 6 (19:11):
So true? And I think that's how coach Jim and
I made an appointment to invite him for a coffee
and then discuss whether he wants to join my board
of directors for my nonprofit.
Speaker 5 (19:26):
And I think I had a good impression, made a good.
Speaker 6 (19:28):
Impression on coach, and Coach agreed immediately and that's how
we started. So that matters a lot.
Speaker 2 (19:36):
Imagine if you would have started by sending him your resume.
Speaker 6 (19:42):
True.
Speaker 5 (19:43):
Yeah, good point.
Speaker 6 (19:44):
So LinkedIn won't work the LinkedIn profile. If you send
the LinkedIn profile to the investors, you're.
Speaker 2 (19:53):
Not your LinkedIn profile. Your LinkedIn profile does not show passion.
Your LinkedIn profile does not answer questions you do.
Speaker 5 (20:02):
That's a good point. So let me delve one more
into trust because you have some other things I want
to delve in. I know Renaul me John do as well,
but your you know, we do focus on trying to
help young leaders. So you're a young leader, you're taking
over because I do leadership presentations as well around the
country and I often ask, you know, the people in
(20:24):
the audience is trust important? And one hundred percent they
all agree. But then I challenge him, do you how
are you going to build trust? You know, do you
have a plan for that? So what advice would you
give a young leader? Because trust is so important? I mean,
obviously you have a lot of information, but if you
can zero down to a couple things to help a
(20:47):
leader get off to a good start in building trust
with their team. What would they be?
Speaker 2 (20:51):
Well, uh, actually, I'm going to give you the complete
opposite of what you're asking for. Why should you be
a leader? One of the questions we never asked. We're
becoming leaders because we look at leadership as a promotion,
not a profession. Leadership is a profession. You can't tell
someone trust your team. Your tream may not be your
(21:15):
team may not be trustworthy, You may not be able
to trust your team. Here's one of the problems and
one of the things we do. We promote. Who do
we promote to be the leader of the sales team?
The best salesperson? Who do we promote to be the
leader of the software development team? The best software developer?
(21:36):
Do we get the best leader? No, we get the
best software developer. Do we get the best leader in sales? No,
we get the best salesperson. Here's the thing. By definition,
if I was the one promoted, if the three of you,
the four of us were up to being, one of
us is going to be the leader and the other
three are going to be my peers or my team,
(21:56):
I should say, now you report to me, Well, I
got promoted. You know why because I'm the best salesperson.
By the way, that's already not a good start, because
when the management told me that I'm the best salesperson,
they told you not in so many words, and you're not.
Now I'm the best sales person. So guess what do
you think that any of you is going to meet
(22:18):
my standards? Do you think that any one of you
is going to be as good as I am? No,
That's why I got promoted. So now I'm starting to
micro manage you because you're not doing as good as
I wanted you to do. And when I micromanage you,
it only gets worse. Now you're losing trust in me.
(22:40):
So you know, I mentioned something when I talked about
the trust goal number six, the reciprocity of trust, that
if I trust you and I show you that I
trust you, I want to give you an example, an
analogy that I typically use in my keynotes. You have kids.
Anybody has kids? Yes, this one on. You look like
(23:03):
you want to have something at least you know what
kids look like, right, yes? Yes, okay, So when Maya,
my twenty six year old girl, was about a year old.
That's when she lifted herself from the floor. Instead of crawling.
She started standing. Once she mastered standing, the next thing
she tried, she tried walking. Once she mastered walking, what
(23:23):
do you think the next thing she tried running, running exactly?
And the first time she tried running, what happened? She
fell down exactly. And the first thing she did when
she fell down was what. No, she didn't scream you
pulled herself up? No, she didn't. The first thing she
(23:43):
did was she turned around and she looked at me.
And if my reaction would have been she would start
crying because obviously something terrible had happened. But if my
reaction would have been get up, keep going, she would
get up and go because obviously nothing terrible has happened,
and because this is what this is, how that is
looking at it. Trust works the same way too. If
(24:06):
you trust someone and you show them that you trust them,
they will behave in a trustworthy way. I already talked
about that the cognitive dissonance otherwise, but what I didn't
say was that, unfortunately, it works the other way around too.
If you don't trust someone and you show them that
you distrust them or even if you trust them, you
just don't show them that you trust them, they will
(24:27):
not behave in a more trustworthy way. So one of
my pieces of advice to leaders, not just young leaders,
any leader, new leaders is I don't recommend that you
trust one hundred percent blind trust. No, that's not safe
for you. I don't recommend. And by the way, in
my surveys, one of the questions that I ask is
(24:49):
where do you rank yourself on how you trust someone
you never met before first time you meet them, And
it's anywhere between zero. I don't trust them at all.
They have to earn my trust before I trust them
one hundred percent. Is I trust them blindly with my life,
even though this is the first time. So it's my
trust is theirs to lose. That's not safe. That's not
(25:11):
safe for me the leader. What I tell them is,
first of all, if I started at one hundred percent,
hypothetically more than they believe that they earned, then they're
going to behave in a more trustworthy way. I'm going
to find that they're a little less trustworthy than I
thought they are, but we're going to meet somewhere high,
(25:31):
pretty high. If, on the other hand, they're right there
in the middle and I started zero, I'm going to
find that they're more trustworthy than I thought. So they're
starting to earn my trust, but they feel that I
don't trust them, their trustworthiness goes down. We're going to
meet again, but in a much, much lower place. What
I always recommend is trust your people just a little
(25:56):
more than you believe they earn. They need to feel
this little gap of you trusting them slightly ahead of
what they believe they earn and deserve for this to
keep spiraling up instead of spiraling down.
Speaker 4 (26:12):
That's brilliant as a leader. And I would say as
a team member, And we've had David Horseger on here
the show, and he's talked a lot about trust as well,
also from a team member perspective and building that trust
with your leader, because as a team member, you want
to make sure that your trust level is high enough
(26:32):
so that especially if the leader does follow your suggestion,
now they're trusting you to a great deal and giving
you more of those responsibilities and privileges. So as a
team member, David in his recent book goes over a
whole bunch of tools for trust.
Speaker 2 (26:48):
I know you have a bunch as well.
Speaker 4 (26:50):
What are a couple of those really powerful tools that
you can use as a team member to earn a
higher degree of trust.
Speaker 2 (26:57):
Well, so the interesting thing is that the framework that
I built with those eight laws of trust and the
six components of trust, what I call my relative trust,
my relative trust model. They are the concept is universal.
It applies to every relationship. So the same things that
(27:19):
apply to a leader I need to think about, you know,
the transferable Let's start with the transferability of trust. Okay,
trust law number five? What am I as a leader
doing to make sure that my team members get an
independent confirmation that I'm someone that they can trust? Same
thing as a team member? What am I as a
(27:40):
team member doing for my new leader to get an
independent confirmation that I am someone that they can trust.
All the components, you know, the components of competency, Just
that we're showing competents in different areas. As a leader,
my competence is in how good did I lead other teams?
Right As a team member, what am I doing in
(28:03):
the team? I'm a salesperson, My competence is how good
am I as a salesperson? So the model is the same.
It's actually funny because Jim mentioned a series of my
minibooks cold Can I Trust You? So while the Book
of Trust, the Minibook of Trust, they are more generic.
They talk about trust in general in every relationship I
(28:27):
wrote so far five mini books like one hundred page each.
They talk about specific roles and how does this apply
to them? So, for example, one of those books is
sixty seven plus one Habits that will make you a
trust worthy leader, So this is how does this framework
apply to leaders? Another one is seventy two plus one
(28:49):
habits that. Oh, I'm sorry, it's the other way around.
Seventy two plus one is for leaders. The sixty seven
plus one is how sixty seven plus one habits they
will make you a trustworthy team member. You're not going
to ask about the plus one, aren't you? Well explained, Okay,
So first of all, it's simply because I can only
(29:12):
count until seventy two. So once it went one more,
I'm like, it's seventy two plus one. Somebody do the
math for me. But now, in reality, in all seriousness,
the reason for the plus one is because the plus
one is unique and it's common to all of them.
That's one habit that's common to all relationships, and that
(29:37):
is that you're not going to be trusted by everyone
except that Walter Cronkite was the most trusted man by
seventy two percent of the voters, not one hundred percent.
You're not going to be trusted by everyone. If you
are not trusted by someone that you need to be trusted. Now,
I don't need to be trusted by everyone, you know,
(29:59):
but there are people I I do need to be
trusted by, especially people who rely on what I do.
If you rely on what I do, then I need
to be trusted by you. And if you don't trust
me yet you have to rely on what I do.
We have a problem. So what if I'm not trusted
by someone I need to be trusted by. First, I
(30:21):
need to understand why why is it that I'm not trusted.
Maybe it's competence. Maybe I'm not competent enough for this role.
So what do we do? I get trained, I shift
to another role or something. But if I don't have
the competence required to do this role better, maybe you know,
take a smaller role or something. But if I can't
(30:43):
do this role the way it was intended to, we
need to fix this. Change my role train me whatever.
The most that it happens is about shared values. It's
about personality compatibility, or I should say personality incompatibility. We're
(31:05):
not compatible personally. Well, now the question is, once we
can identify what is it? Is it important enough for me,
the person who needs to be trusted to change? Is
it important enough for the person who needs to trust
to change? How important is it? Can I change? And
(31:33):
do I have the willingness to change?
Speaker 1 (31:36):
So?
Speaker 2 (31:37):
You know, One of the examples that I like to
give is when I worked in Texas instruments, I went
to my boss and I had renuma, just like you.
I had all kinds of ideas and I was going
there and presenting ideas to her, and I could feel
(31:57):
that almost always she would have an immediate allergic reaction
to what I was suggesting. Almost always an allergic reaction.
Didn't like it. Well, at some point I was trying
to understand why, and in something you know, her immediate
allergic reaction made me ask this question, do you prefer
(32:22):
for me? And this goes back again rhuma to to
sending the business planner or sending the LinkedIn profile? Do
you prefer for me to give you the bottom line
first of what I'm asking for, and then explain the
rationale or take you through my thought process and end
(32:42):
with the bottom line. Now, I'm a bottom line first person.
As it turns out, so is seventy six percent of
the people that I asked in the survey. Give me
the bottom line. The bottom line gives me context. So
everything else you say will support or reject whatever you
told me as the bottom line. She was the opposite.
(33:04):
She said, every time you give me the bottom line
and I don't have the foundation for it, I don't
have what your thought process was, I immediately find what's wrong
with it, and then it's hard for me to even
listen to you later. So was it important for me
to be to be trusted or relied by her? Let's
(33:27):
start with that. So I was relied by her. She
had to rely on me because I was running one
hundred million dollar business unit with eighty nine people for her.
So it was important for her to be able to
trust me. Was it something that I was capable of changing? Yeah,
when I meet with her, I need to remember, don't
(33:50):
start with the bottom line, take her through your thought process.
From that moment on, her level of trust in me
went up.
Speaker 6 (34:01):
So I'm and this is so important that trust level
on others, and I often I experience it with my
previous chairperson as well, because if you don't have positivity
or open mindedness, and if you also have some stereotypical
understanding of the other person, often that trust mutual trust
(34:23):
doesn't happen, and you have to do something extra to
earn that trust. Trust. But unfortunately, we are in a
world where a fear is dictating so many of our
foundation of relationships. So I'm fearful of the other person.
I'm fearful of this group and that group, and that
is why it's often that trust we need to build
(34:46):
to build that world that we are aspiring to, it's
not happening. And one of the reasons I'm thinking about
is our leaders sometimes need to be vulnerable, showing that
I'm not confident always I do not know the answer.
So what is your take on the importance of vulnerability
(35:07):
to build that trust among everybody else?
Speaker 2 (35:11):
Two hundred and forty percent? What's your next question? Maybe
a little more detail? Is so actually in one of
my studies, and it is in the Book of Trust.
In one of my surveys, I try to correlate the component.
Three components actually the component of vulnerability. It's my willingness
(35:32):
to ask stupid questions and not worry about what you're
going to say. My willingness to suggest stupid ideas and
not worry about what you have to say, my vulnerability
in general. The second one was my willingness to give
you the feedback that you need to hear, not the
feedback I think you want to hear. And the third
(35:53):
one is my receptivity to that kind of feedback that
comes from you or too stupid ideas or stupid questions.
How receptive I am. So, first of all, before I
even get there, what I found was that here are
two things that are closely related. Trust within the team
or in a relationship, and the willingness and ability to
(36:17):
hold what I call a constructive disagreement. So, a constructive
disagreement is where we can discuss everything. It's the most optimal,
the most effective way of arguing. I can say anything,
I will listen to everything that you say. On the
other two extremes, we have the destructive disagreement. This is
where everything becomes personal, emotional, and irrational. This is when
(36:41):
it's not your idea that stupid. It's you are stupid.
Then on the other side is what we call and
we have way too much of that, the politically correct disagreement.
This is where we have the meeting before the meeting,
the meeting after the meeting, just not the meeting during
the meeting, you know what I mean. It's where the
things get closed outside of the conference room. So we
(37:04):
need to be in that effective one. And what I
found was that when I ask people how comfortable are
you in holding a disagreement in general in a high
trust environment, sixty one percent of people said they are
(37:24):
uncomfortable holding disagreement. Disagreements are not effective. They would try
everything they can to avoid the disagreement sixty one percent.
Only thirty one percent said that they embrace a disagreement
in a low trust environment. In a high trust and
I think I said the way. In a low trust environment,
sixty one percent say we try to avoid disagreement at
(37:46):
all costs. In a high trust environment, that sixty one
percent becomes six percent. Wow, ninety four percent feel more
comfortable disagreement. But back to your question about vulnerable, I
trust two for two hundred and forty percent correlated with
vulnerability two hundred and forty percent correlated with vulnerability one
(38:10):
hundred and six percent correlated with the willingness, the willingness
to give you the feedback that you need to hear,
not what I think you want to hear. And this
goes back to what we talked about before the show
about my my upcoming book about evaluating ideas and what
I tell my students at SMU. I tell them what
they need to know, not what I feel they want
(38:32):
to hear. So it's going to be somebody else's problem
at the end. And the third one, the receptivity is
seventy six percent higher in a high trust environment. But
you're right for NUMA. By the way, this is a cycle.
The more vulnerable I am, the more you're going to
trust me. The more you're going to trust me, the
more I'm going to feel that I can be vulnerable.
Speaker 6 (38:54):
And this is so true because I run a nonprofit
with one hundred plus volunteers and ten executive members and
board of directors, and we have so much disagreement at
every meeting, but it never broke our trust on each other.
So I will openly tell them that I do not
know the answer. Help me out if anything goes wrong,
(39:16):
I admit and others admit, and they're learning from me because,
as coach always said, lead by example. When I'm admitting
my mistakes, now if my team members are also making
any mistakes, they will admit it instead of hiding. And
this I created. I'm fortunate enough and blessed enough to
have that powerful team who are very comfortable with disagreements
(39:39):
and they're not always trying to make me feel good.
Speaker 2 (39:44):
I agree when you said that you say that you
don't know, it's I don't know and I'll find out
right right. It's this one is much harder. I was wrong,
very hard for people to say I was wrong. By
the way, once you mastered that I was wrong, there
(40:04):
is an advanced version, but that's you know, don't try
that at home after saying I was wrong, try staying
and you were right.
Speaker 5 (40:18):
I could talk to you all day. Yes, the boss
of things we do got to dove in. We're getting
close to the end of our time. But with your
new book about ideas, can you share about that, because
you know, one of the things we talked about is
your nobs style and you know, and you talked a
little bit about ideas before we started broadcasting the show,
(40:41):
so share some about the book here and about ideas definitely.
Speaker 2 (40:46):
So the class that I built and back in twenty
eighteen and i'm teaching and now five times a year,
is called Evaluating Entrepreneurial Opportunities, And it's really about how
do you evaluate the idea? You know, I've heard so
many times. First of all, everything is a great idea, right,
No it's not. No, it's not. If you know the statistics,
(41:08):
and they're there in the book at the beginning of
the book, your probability of success is almost zero. And
I just, you know, hypothetically, said let's call it one
in one hundred. By the way, it's less than one
in one hundred, so it's one in three thousand. Those
research that showed that one in three thousand ideas actually
reach a commercial viability. So let's say it's one in
(41:30):
one hundred. The probability that you have a great idea,
that you started with a great idea is almost nothing.
And what I tell my students the first thing is
never fall in love with your idea or with your solution.
Always fall in love with the problem or the pain
that you're addressing, because when you fall in love with
(41:53):
the pain with the problem, you're going to solve it.
When you fall in love with your idea, you're going
to ignore the fact that it doesn't solve the pain.
And that is the number one reason why ideas fail.
One of the other things that I was telling my
students all the time is, look, this class is not
about telling you how rade your idea is. It's about
telling you how soon. It's about teaching you how quickly
(42:15):
can you kill it? Because even if your odds are
one in one hundred, you need to kill ninety nine ideas.
So I'm going to teach you how to quickly, quickly
quickly kill them. Well, as it turns out, so this
and I told you before since we talked, I think
a couple of months ago, I accidentally wrote another book.
(42:37):
So that's that's the new book that I just finished
writing the first draft. So now it's editing and everything else.
But I just woke up one morning and I said,
there is no textbook about it. And you know, I
don't know if I'm going to wake up tomorrow morning.
Well there's the storms and all, but you know, you
(42:59):
don't know if you're going to wake up tomorrow morning.
My PhD dissertation committee chair and mentor. When I was
almost done with the dissertation, about to submit chapter five,
I get a call from the university. He went to
sleep Monday night and did not wake up Tuesday morning.
We don't know if we're going to wake up. There
is no textbook that covers this part. All the textbooks,
(43:22):
all the books that are being used in entrepreneurship programs
throughout the nation touch on it, and that's it. And
we're afraid to say this is a bad idea. So
I started writing this book, and you know, my thought was,
this is going to be like a five y eight tiny,
one hundred and fifty page book. I stopped at three
(43:46):
hundred and fifty pages of very you know, small line
spacing at six by nine. So this is I'm writing
it as a textbook on evaluating ideas. And you know
the name of the book. And unfortunately it's going to
take me a while to share with you the design.
The it's great idea, big capital letters, great idea, and
(44:10):
then in hand written font it says, is it really
a great idea?
Speaker 4 (44:18):
And that's the question we all have to ask ourselves
as entrepreneurs, because we do fall in love with those
ideas so much that we try to get them to work,
and really, we're fitting a square peg into a round hole, right,
and it's just not working and causing more and more frustration.
And I have to ask you too, as we come
up on the end, doctor Salmon, when it comes to
(44:39):
entrepreneurship oftentimes, like I love the Donald Miller, like the
story brand kind of Yeah, yeah, really, where we're talking
about being the guide and not the hero. That's what
I was going to ask you. As an entrepreneur, how
do we shift our mindset with our ideas as well,
going from being that hero who has the solution to
(45:02):
being somebody who can work you through the problem and
be malleable enough to realize that our solution isn't always
the best solution.
Speaker 2 (45:11):
Yeah. So, first of all, I had you saw that
I was smiling when you talked about a square peg
in a round hole. And the reason is because that's
the drawing on the cover of the book. It's a
square peg. Ind I mean, it's it's a very cool
way and you know, believe it or not, I did
not use a designer, you know who designed that cover
(45:34):
image for me ai jet GPT wow, I said with
cheed GPT and I said, what would be a concept
of bad ideas? You know, it's not a great idea.
And the first concept that came back with wash, square peg,
round hole. And we were going back and forth. I mean,
this is like two hundred different versions as we were
(45:56):
together building the cover. It's it's a beautiful cover, emails.
But you know again, I can share it now. However,
so if you go through the process of that book,
that book goes through a process and it is six tests.
And by the way, that's what I do in my class.
(46:17):
The book comes out of what I've been teaching for
the last seven years. Six tests. How do you let
go of your idea? Because you start with who the
customer is, and you start by a definition of the customer.
And I always tell my students when they come back
and say, oh, our customer is between the ages of
(46:38):
twenty six and sixty five, above average income in urban environment,
It's like that says nothing about your customer. That says
nothing about your customer. Your customer has to be unique enough.
Any of you left handed by any chance? Yeah, actually, hello, okay,
(46:59):
what is that you're not getting? What is it that's
hard for you to get to.
Speaker 4 (47:03):
Find well, several different things. I don't open cans very
well with manual can openers.
Speaker 2 (47:09):
Yes, there are a lot of things. By the way,
in case you didn't get it, I'm left handed too,
and we know there are things that are not catered
to us. If you try to define your customer as
someone in the area of entrepreneurship and edgend professor or
something like this, we're both going to fall into it.
(47:29):
But so many other people that are not suffering from
a pain that you and I are suffering being left handed. Yeah,
so it's more about the psychographic than the demographic of
your audience. So there's this part a good evaluation, and
I actually created a tool to evaluate your customer thirteen
(47:50):
elements and scoring and everything. How do you value or
score do you have the right customer? The second is
is it a strong enough as severe enough pain so
you know, think of it in these terms. Are you
giving them a painkiller, a vitamin or candy? Think about it.
(48:16):
Painkiller I need right now, A vitamin I need to
save myself from something in the future. Candy It's nice
to have. I'd like candy right now. Does it help
me in any way. No, it doesn't. What is it
that you're offering a painkiller, a vitamin or candy. The
third one is the value to price ratio of your
(48:39):
product and how different is it from everything else that
everything else that's available, or what I call the best
current alternative. So that's actually the topic of the class
that we have tonight. It's the third week, so it's
the third test. The fourth test is the prototype and
that's what they're going to do next week. How do
(49:01):
we This is where robber meets the road. The fifth
test is a sustainable competitive advantage. You know, it's not
enough that you have a great idea that really solves
a problem. Everything is good except you can't protect it.
And the sixth one is does it really create profit
not only to you, but enough motivation for everyone you
(49:25):
need to participate in the value chain. It's not enough
that it brings profit to your company. Anyone you rely
on has to make a profit or somehow be motivated
enough to participate. So this is kind of you can
see as I'm taking you through it that I am
almost forcing yourself to detach yourself from the idea itself
(49:49):
and focus more on the analysis.
Speaker 4 (49:53):
Wow, I love that. I you know, I might want
to connect with you doctor Solomon too, just because we
do have a lot of overlap as far as the
class that I teach here at the college more on
the marketing side of things, but we talk about things
like demographics, psychographics, and I'm definitely going to be checking
out your book when it comes out, so I will
(50:13):
definitely stay up on you and one of your first
book customers, because that's going to be a really great
book to help me better communicate those principles to my students.
So thank you for sharing all that.
Speaker 2 (50:27):
The plan is very simple. This book needs to be
available for students to purchase two weeks before the beginning
of the full semester.
Speaker 4 (50:36):
Okay, well that's that's going to be an aggressive timeline, right,
but I believe you can note.
Speaker 2 (50:41):
Three hundred and fifty pages in two and a half weeks.
Speaker 6 (50:47):
It's great.
Speaker 2 (50:47):
By the wait, this is not chet GPT wrote my book, right,
chet GPT. You know what chet GPT did. I wrote
a chapter and it cut it in half. It said
half the things you wrote there are not needed. What
cha GIPT did to me. That's why I don't talk
to it anymore.
Speaker 6 (51:04):
You don't trust, you don't trust chat GPT.
Speaker 2 (51:07):
No disappointed me, But seriously, it's one of the classes
that I did that I give in the National Speakers
Association is how to really use chat gipt to write books.
The whole idea of that this is a textbook, just
to kind of give you something about that was at
some point I asked Chad Gipt, now think about this question.
(51:29):
What would Mark Cuban, Ery Crease and Steve Blank say
about this book? You have the book, they haven't. What
would they say? Now? I asked it to be bluntly
honest with me, brutally honest with me. It said, well,
here's what Mark Cuban would say. And and again, you know,
it learns Mark Cuban, it knows how Mark Cuban speaks,
(51:51):
and so on it goes, get to the goddamn point. Already,
this is too long, This is too much analysis. This
is entrepreneurs need to be out there in market. And
then he said, this was an amazing line. Drop the classrooms,
drop the classroom angle. I'm not wait a minute, I'm
(52:13):
writing a textbook. I'm not writing an entrepreneurship book. I'm
writing a textbook. Then I asked, what would a renowned
entrepreneurship professor say about this book? So it started digging
up Harvard, Stanford, Mit, do you call the you know,
the big programs entrepreneurship program the professors. I even got
(52:36):
a raving review from Clayton Christensen, who died five years ago.
But that was yes. So that was just so that
you know, I told you that I wrote the book
in two and a half weeks. I misled you a
little because I spent four weeks on the outline. Four
(52:58):
weeks on the outline, going back and forth is that needed?
Here is the right flow? And start blowing up the
outline into specific paragraphs. So this is what I'm going
to write here, This is what I'm going to write here,
and keep on revising and revising. Four weeks I spend
on revising, going back and forth on the outline. Once
I was down with the outline two and a half
(53:20):
weeks to write three hundred and fifty pages.
Speaker 4 (53:21):
Wow, and really seven hundred pages because they cut that
in half.
Speaker 2 (53:25):
So not to old chapters.
Speaker 4 (53:29):
Doctor Yorm Solomon has written books for entrepreneurs, for academics,
living and dead. He's communicating with all types of people
here and we love that. And especially for the entrepreneur
or just the person, the leader or team member who
wants to build trust. What's the best way to learn
more about you? Which of your twenty and a half
(53:52):
books should we start with? And how can we get
in touch if there are any ways to do that.
Speaker 2 (53:58):
So obviously as far as which one of the twenty
one books, because by the time if this show airs
it right now, it's August twentieth, and the book is out,
the book is out, So it's twenty one books. Which
one to start with? It depends on what you want
to know if you want to understand trust. Jim already
(54:20):
said that he got the Minibook of Trust because I
felt it was cruel and unusual punishment to give him
the Book of Trust that is five hundred and fifty
pages five hundred and fifty pages long, and so I
sent Jim the Minibook of Trust much easier. So I
always recommend for people, if you're interested in trust, get
(54:44):
the Minibook of Trust. Maybe get one of the five
minibooks for the different roles like consultant, advisor, project manager,
and so on, So that might be a good starting
point you you read the Mini Book of Trust and
you go, this was really good, but I need to
(55:05):
go a level deeper. I need to understand the background.
That's when you get the Book of Trust. That's if
you care about trust, if you care about entrepreneurship. Then
several different books. One is it really a great idea
coming out? Well, already came out since we're in August.
The second one is my first book ever, Bowling with
(55:27):
a Crystal Ball, How to find opportunities in technology and
how to capitalize them and navigate them through industry. Book
number four Unkilled Creativity. You know, we keep thinking about
creativity coming from startups, which, by the way, the topic
of my research, my PhD research was why are people
so much more creative when they work for small startup
(55:50):
companies than when they work for large, mature companies. That
was the topic and book number four came out of it.
It's called Unkilled Creativity. How Corporate America can out innovate
to startups. Culture Starts with You, Not Your Boss is
another small book about organizational culture. So it really depends
on what you want to know in terms of which book.
(56:12):
Oh and of course book number two Worst Died Ever,
How to lose weight and leave healthy. Believe me. That
was book number two, which was really not a book
about weight loss. It's a book about how do you
find the motivation to do the things that are important
but long term over the things that are much less
important but immediate. That led to the process that I
(56:35):
call the Trust Habits that's covered in the Book of Trust.
Easiest way to find me your Solomon dot com y
O R A M S O L O M O
N dot com, Trust Habits dot com. Same website and
listen to it's free The Trust Show podcast, The Trust Show.
Speaker 6 (56:54):
I need to Yeah, I need to allocate a sheef
for you.
Speaker 2 (57:00):
That's the idea.
Speaker 4 (57:02):
Yeah, the your Michelle Fiaz The Trust Show podcast available.
Speaker 2 (57:05):
By the way, I er marketing, sales and everything, and
I have ash out for your books.
Speaker 4 (57:13):
Make your next podcast. Listen to the Trust Show podcast.
That'll be on any of those platforms that you found
us on. Doctor orm Solomon, thank you so much for
your time today and everything you shared about trust, entrepreneurship,
and so much more. We really appreciate your time and
your insight.
Speaker 2 (57:29):
It was great being with you.
Speaker 3 (57:30):
Thank you for joining us this week at the Limitless
Leadership Lounge. To listen to this episode again and to
find previous episodes, check us out on Apple Podcasts, Spotify,
and Spreaker. You can also get in on the conversation
find us on Facebook and Instagram, then tell three of
your friends to join in as well. Coach Brnuma and John.
We'll be back again next week for another try generational
(57:52):
leadership discussion. We'll talk to you then on the Limitless
Leadership Lounge
This podcast is a proud member of the Teach Better
podcast network, Better Today, Better Tomorrow, and the podcast to
get you there. You can find out more at Teechbetter
dot com slash podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Why should you be a leader? One of the questions
we never asked. We're becoming leaders because we look at
leadership as a promotion, not a profession. Leadership is a profession.
Trust your people just a little more than you believe
they earn. They need to fill this little gap of you,
(00:32):
trusting them slightly ahead of what they believe they earn
and deserve. Never fall in love with your idea or
with your solution. Always fall in love with the problem
or the pain that you're addressing.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
Do you want to be a leader in a constantly
changing world? Our emerging leaders look different, come from various
backgrounds and from all different age groups. Leadership is changing
and it's hard to keep up.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
But the good news you can be a leader too.
Speaker 3 (01:03):
You can be an emerging leader. Welcome to the Limitless
Leadership Lounge, a try generational conversation for emerging leaders. Come
spend some time with us to discuss leadership from three angles.
The Coach Jim Johnson, the Professor, doctor Reneuma Kareem, the host,
John Gering a monthly guest, and you get in on
(01:25):
the conversation on Facebook and Instagram and be sure to
follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Speaker. So come
on in and make yourself comfortable.
Speaker 4 (01:34):
Back for another week of the Limitless Leadership Lounge. This
is what we call a try generational conversation for you,
the emerging leader. So whether or not you're checking us
out right now on any of the audio platforms or
up on YouTube, we appreciate you having us on today
because we're going to dive into some more leadership insights,
especially surrounding entrepreneurship and trust. Excited for our conversation today.
(01:56):
I'm joined as always by doctor Numa Kareem and coach
Jim Johnson and co which is going to welcome our
guests today. So go write ahead, coach and let's dive in.
Speaker 5 (02:04):
Yeah, we're really excited. I got a chance to talk
to doctor Joram Solomon and he has got a lot
to offer our audience today, So just give you a
little bio on him. He's got a lot in his bio,
but I'm going to cut it down. Is the author
of the book of trust and by the way, he
sent me the mini Book of Trust that I read
and recommended my network as a really good book and
(02:26):
the most comprehensive book ever written about trust, the book
series Can I Trust You? And the host of the
Trust Show podcast. He has published a total of twenty books,
although he is now almost done with his twenty first book,
so we're looking forward to that and we'll get into
a little bit about that book in our interview. And
has written also more than four hundred articles on trust, innovation, culture,
(02:51):
and entrepreneurship. Orm holds a PhD in organization and management,
an MBA, a law degree, and an engineering degree. And
how you got all that? Because if I got all those,
I'd be into my grave, So I don't have congratulations.
He's an adjunct Professor of Entrepreneurship, a three time ted
X speaker, a former executive, elected official, pilot, and a
(03:13):
member of the Israel Israeli thirty fifth Airborne Brigade. Through
his keynotes, workshops and teachings, known for his no bs
style of telling you what you need to hear and
now what you think you want to hear, without further
adore your Solomon. Welcome to the Limitless Leadership Lounge.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
Thank you coach. Great to be with you from Stormy, Texas.
Speaker 5 (03:39):
Well, we all three of us now. Doctor Kareem is
back in Rochester and we're we do have sunshine, but
it's about forty five degrees, so we're a little bit
chillier than will be.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
I'll take it so well.
Speaker 5 (03:54):
I got to say to you, I know trust is
something you spend a lot of time research, and can
you talk some about your eight laws of trust? If
you could share those and maybe delve into one or
two of them because trust is so essential in building
as a leader.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
No, I'm not going to talk, Okay, I will so
you know. The funny thing is, I did not invent
those eight laws of trust. I did not make them up.
I did not create them. I observed them. Ever since
I started working on my own PhD research back in
two thousand and eight, I started observing the ways trust behave.
And I'll tell you something, I would not have committed
(04:36):
to the topic of trust if it wasn't for realizing
that I see something different, different than what most people.
Most people look for, so kind of in a very
high level, what are the eight laws? First? Trust is continuous.
It's not I trust you or I don't trust you.
It's not binary. It's continuous. Second, it's contextual. Third, it's personal.
(05:00):
This is the same behavior that would cause one person
to trust me could cause another person to distrust me. Fourth,
it's asymmetrical. The level of trust that I have in
you does not reflect on the level of trust that
you have in me. Those are completely different things based
on completely different independent bearable number five. Trust is transferable.
(05:23):
If I trust you Jim, and you trust John, then
I will trust John. Maybe not to the same extent
I trust you or you trust him, but more than
nothing because you said something about him, You said you
can trust him. It's transferable. It is reciprocal. When I
say reciprocal, let's not confuse that with a with symmetrical.
(05:43):
When I say reciprocal, it's not that if I trust you, you
will trust me. It's if I trust you and I
show you that I trust you, you will behave in
a more trustworthy way, because otherwise you feel this cognitive
dissonance of a feeling that you're trusted by someone but
not believing that you earned the trust. You're going to
(06:03):
work on earning that trust. Number seven. Trust is dynamic.
It changes all the time. There is no fixed level
of trust. I may trust you at a certain level
right now and a different level later. And finally, trust
is two sided. It is the level of trust that
I have in you, John for example, is the product
(06:26):
of your trustworthiness and my trustfulness. It's my willingness to
trust people in general, or your kind of people. I
don't know radio personalities, for example, in still in general.
So you may be the world's most trustworthy person, and
I'm still not going to trust you. And it's not you,
(06:48):
it's me, which is like the last thing you say
before you break up with someone. It's not you, it's me,
But it is. It's a part of my trustfulness. Now.
I know. I went through eight laws, and it's kind
of you're trying to remember them than other than reading
them in the book. I decided. Somebody told me when
I joined the National Speakers Association that if you want
(07:10):
to make people remember something, you need to give them
an acronym. And if you give them an acronym, it's
going to be easier to remember. So remember, trust is continuous, contextual, personal, asymmetrical, transferable, reciprocal, dynamic,
and two sided. So I made an acronym. It's kok Patro.
So if you are trying to remember, just remember patro
(07:33):
and it's all going to come back to you.
Speaker 4 (07:36):
Man. And so you, uh, it's so funny because we
think of like catchy acronyms, but sometimes you have to
adjust words and phrases to fit yourself into that catchy acronym. Right,
But you're just like, let's tell it like it is.
And I love that about about that. So, yes, you
(07:56):
got to get the book, though, you got to get
the book to dive into each one of them. Some
of those I think come fairly intuitively to us, but
there are others that I feel like people might want
to delve into a little bit more.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
What are one or two.
Speaker 4 (08:10):
Of those that you feel like we're not doing a
good enough job of grasping.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
Okay, so the first one is I mentioned the trust
is personal. So I'll give you an example. So you're
an adjunct professor yourself, and are you familiar with the
website called rate my Professors. Yes, unfortunately, there don't go there,
trust me, don't go there. But so one day my
younger daughter, she was in college, and she was signing
(08:39):
up her classes and I saw her going to that
website Rate my Professors, and I'm like, what is that website?
She said, oh, other students anonymously because we don't want
to actually say who we are when we're going to
give that kind of review. Anonymously posted reviews about professors,
so I can look them up decide if this is
(09:00):
a professor I want to sign up to. And I'm
thinking this is brilliant. But wait a minute, I'm a
professor at SMU. Do I have a page on Rate
my Professor's because I didn't make one. So I go
there and sure enough, my name is there, and there
is a web there is a site, and I went
there and the first review said something like doctor Som
(09:23):
Professor Solomon is awesome if you want to learn entrepreneurship.
He gives great feedback and so on. I'm awesome. Just
so that you know. And now do you think that
I'm telling you this to brag, Well, actually that's my
main reason, but no, and I'm not trying to brag.
I'm not trying to recruit you to my class CISB
(09:44):
sixty to twenty six. But the reason is and get
ready for some vulnerability. By the way, vulnerability is very
connected to trust. I can sense this is going to
be a next question. Never mind, get ready for some
vulnerability for me. Don't worry. The next review he's how
(10:06):
did it say it? It said something like his attitude
is arrogant, condescending, but he's a good grader, which we
know is the most important part in college, right in
the college class. And I'm looking at this, and here's
the thing that came right after a semester where I
(10:26):
only taught one class that semester. This was in twenty nineteen,
so it's before COVID. It's not over zoom. This was
in a classroom. This had to And the two reviews
came ten days apart. So these were two students that
set at the same classroom at the same time, in
the same class. I was the same person. How come
(10:48):
one of them gives me five out of five and
says I'm awesome. The other one gives me one out
of five and says I'm awful. Well. Trust is personal,
and different people see different things in you. Different people
care about different things, different people prioritize different things. I mean, today,
(11:09):
if you think about our political division that we have,
just knowing that you're a member or a supporter of
the other party, is good enough for me not to
trust you or for other people not to trust me.
I'll tell you upfront that when I vote, I voted
for candidates from both major parties in every election because
(11:34):
I care about the person, not about the party. I'm
not a good representation of everyone here. So the same behavior.
What I found was that the same behavior that I
did in the classroom, for example, that could cause one
person to trust me or to give me five out
of five and say that I'm awesome, the same behavior
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would cause another one to say that I'm awful, give
me one out of five and not trust me. So
that's one very different perspective I have on trust. That
trust is relative. It's personal, but it's relative. It's not absolute.
It's not universal. There is no set of questions or
checkboxes that if you can check all of them, you're
(12:16):
going to be trusted by all people. To remember, back
in nineteen seventy two, there was a pull of the
most trusted men in America. I'm sorry, Ranuma, the most
trusted men in America, that's what they said. And they
were looking for governors, and I think it was yeah,
it was presidential candidates and all, but they threw in
(12:37):
TV anchors and sure enough, Walter Cronkite came out as
the most Trusted men in America. CBS used it for years,
the most Trusted Men in America. Even he got seventy
two percent of the vote, not one hundred percent. So
that's one thing. Trust is relative. I know, we would
(12:58):
rather have a checklist of things that if we can
check all of them, you trust that. If you can't,
you're not. But it's not. What's true for GM is
not true for you can't please ever get one the
second one. You wanted me to give you two. The
second one is number five. That trust is transferable and
I found that. So my twentieth book is actually called
(13:20):
The Trust Premium, which I can also see from my
logo here, and that is focused on the relationship between
a salesperson, a professional selling services to a customer. Because
with the level of trust, with the level of freaks
marketing and sales trincs use today to lure you to
(13:41):
you know, Baden's Switch and everything else, trust is the
only differentiator. And so now the question is what causes
your customer to trust you and what I found was
that transferable trust plays a major role. Right now, I'm
in the middle of a project to replace windows in
my house. How did I find the contractor? Did I
(14:03):
go online to search?
Speaker 3 (14:04):
No?
Speaker 2 (14:05):
I asked my friends. I ask people that I trust,
who do you recommend? Before that we need the remodeling
for the pool? How did I find the contractor for that?
I ask friends who remodeled the pool to recommend someone.
So the transferable trust is a key part of trust
and it's only getting bigger.
Speaker 6 (14:24):
And Doctor Solomon, among your six components of trustworthiness, you
mentioned like we need to know beforehand before to interact,
and if I want to form a relationship or if
I want to have a business, I want to know
that person beforehand. And nowadays a lot of young people
are starting different businesses, different entrepreneurship projects, but often there
(14:50):
are investors who do not trust them. So what would
be your advice to some of them? How do they
build that profile to gain that trust ahead so that
it's easier for them to communicate.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
So that's a great question, and we'll start with you
mentioned the six components of my trust model, So just
to bring it in here, there are three components that
I consider to be who you are. Those are the
three that you want to know ahead of a meeting.
So this is what I know about you before we met.
So you told me before we started that you checked
(15:30):
me out. You went to my online presence, You looked
at some of my articles, you read all four hundred
and something of them. You made it, okay, you know
you didn't, but you didn't read of my twenty books.
But there was enough there to establish three things. One
and those are the three components. Competence. We're interviewing somebody
who's competent. Number two, personality compatibility. From what I see,
(15:55):
we are kind of aligned in our priorities, in our values.
By the way, in my research, one of the things
that I found was that the number one factor that
affects trustworthiness is the level of shared values that we have.
If we share values, there is an eighty six percent
correlation that I found between that and trustworthiness. Number three
(16:15):
is symmetry, the symmetry of our relationship. And I'm not
gonna dig too deep into that, but you know, a
very famous astronaut by the name of Jeff Bezos said
that your brand is what people say about you when
you're not in the room, so it's really important that
you establish those things. Now. I do want to finish
(16:38):
that with one little piece of advice, because you talked
about investors and entrepreneurs, young entrepreneurs who are just starting.
I'll give you advice that I give all of my students,
my students. You know, we're in the age of text
and email and Instagram and snapchat and everything, and it's
(16:59):
very easy to send an email right, a lot easier
than to have a talk. And so what I get
from a lot of students is, first, here is my
business plan. Let's schedule a time to talk. And what
I tell them is, never ever let your business plan
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hold the first meeting with the investor. Never let your
business plan hold the first meeting with the investor, because
if there's anything that's left open there, the investor makes assumptions.
If this is not written the way you think it's written,
the investor makes assumptions. If you didn't put a dot
(17:42):
or a comma in the right place, the investor makes assumptions.
Do you want them to make assumptions or do you
want them to first see you get your passion, understand,
ask questions, and get them answered because you're there, or
do you want a piece of paper? Do the talking
(18:04):
for you the first talking, so you know when I
talk about the I talked about the three components you
want to know before the meeting. But there are three
components of what happens during the meeting. One of them
is your positivity, made of two things no bs, attitude
and empathy. Can you put yourself in there? Can you
see things from their perspective? Those are accelerated by the
(18:26):
two other components, time and intimacy. Intimacy goes back into
the business line. Is an email, is a document? Intimacy
is seeing the other person, seeing the white of their eyes. Time.
The longer we spend time together, the more we build
or destroy trust, depending on our personality compatibility. Well, our
(18:51):
brain needs a certain amount of information to feel safe.
If we don't have that information in the form of facts,
what do we do? We make assumptions. The first impression
is so important. Don't let the businessman make the first impression.
Speaker 6 (19:11):
So true? And I think that's how coach Jim and
I made an appointment to invite him for a coffee
and then discuss whether he wants to join my board
of directors for my nonprofit.
Speaker 5 (19:26):
And I think I had a good impression, made a good.
Speaker 6 (19:28):
Impression on coach, and Coach agreed immediately and that's how
we started. So that matters a lot.
Speaker 2 (19:36):
Imagine if you would have started by sending him your resume.
Speaker 6 (19:42):
True.
Speaker 5 (19:43):
Yeah, good point.
Speaker 6 (19:44):
So LinkedIn won't work the LinkedIn profile. If you send
the LinkedIn profile to the investors, you're.
Speaker 2 (19:53):
Not your LinkedIn profile. Your LinkedIn profile does not show passion.
Your LinkedIn profile does not answer questions you do.
Speaker 5 (20:02):
That's a good point. So let me delve one more
into trust because you have some other things I want
to delve in. I know Renaul me John do as well,
but your you know, we do focus on trying to
help young leaders. So you're a young leader, you're taking
over because I do leadership presentations as well around the
country and I often ask, you know, the people in
(20:24):
the audience is trust important? And one hundred percent they
all agree. But then I challenge him, do you how
are you going to build trust? You know, do you
have a plan for that? So what advice would you
give a young leader? Because trust is so important? I mean,
obviously you have a lot of information, but if you
can zero down to a couple things to help a
(20:47):
leader get off to a good start in building trust
with their team. What would they be?
Speaker 2 (20:51):
Well, uh, actually, I'm going to give you the complete
opposite of what you're asking for. Why should you be
a leader? One of the questions we never asked. We're
becoming leaders because we look at leadership as a promotion,
not a profession. Leadership is a profession. You can't tell
someone trust your team. Your tream may not be your
(21:15):
team may not be trustworthy, You may not be able
to trust your team. Here's one of the problems and
one of the things we do. We promote. Who do
we promote to be the leader of the sales team?
The best salesperson? Who do we promote to be the
leader of the software development team? The best software developer?
(21:36):
Do we get the best leader? No, we get the
best software developer. Do we get the best leader in sales? No,
we get the best salesperson. Here's the thing. By definition,
if I was the one promoted, if the three of you,
the four of us were up to being, one of
us is going to be the leader and the other
three are going to be my peers or my team,
(21:56):
I should say, now you report to me, Well, I
got promoted. You know why because I'm the best salesperson.
By the way, that's already not a good start, because
when the management told me that I'm the best salesperson,
they told you not in so many words, and you're not.
Now I'm the best sales person. So guess what do
you think that any of you is going to meet
(22:18):
my standards? Do you think that any one of you
is going to be as good as I am? No,
That's why I got promoted. So now I'm starting to
micro manage you because you're not doing as good as
I wanted you to do. And when I micromanage you,
it only gets worse. Now you're losing trust in me.
(22:40):
So you know, I mentioned something when I talked about
the trust goal number six, the reciprocity of trust, that
if I trust you and I show you that I
trust you, I want to give you an example, an
analogy that I typically use in my keynotes. You have kids.
Anybody has kids? Yes, this one on. You look like
(23:03):
you want to have something at least you know what
kids look like, right, yes? Yes, okay, So when Maya,
my twenty six year old girl, was about a year old.
That's when she lifted herself from the floor. Instead of crawling.
She started standing. Once she mastered standing, the next thing
she tried, she tried walking. Once she mastered walking, what
(23:23):
do you think the next thing she tried running, running exactly?
And the first time she tried running, what happened? She
fell down exactly. And the first thing she did when
she fell down was what. No, she didn't scream you
pulled herself up? No, she didn't. The first thing she
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did was she turned around and she looked at me.
And if my reaction would have been she would start
crying because obviously something terrible had happened. But if my
reaction would have been get up, keep going, she would
get up and go because obviously nothing terrible has happened,
and because this is what this is, how that is
looking at it. Trust works the same way too. If
(24:06):
you trust someone and you show them that you trust them,
they will behave in a trustworthy way. I already talked
about that the cognitive dissonance otherwise, but what I didn't
say was that, unfortunately, it works the other way around too.
If you don't trust someone and you show them that
you distrust them or even if you trust them, you
just don't show them that you trust them, they will
(24:27):
not behave in a more trustworthy way. So one of
my pieces of advice to leaders, not just young leaders,
any leader, new leaders is I don't recommend that you
trust one hundred percent blind trust. No, that's not safe
for you. I don't recommend. And by the way, in
my surveys, one of the questions that I ask is
(24:49):
where do you rank yourself on how you trust someone
you never met before first time you meet them, And
it's anywhere between zero. I don't trust them at all.
They have to earn my trust before I trust them
one hundred percent. Is I trust them blindly with my life,
even though this is the first time. So it's my
trust is theirs to lose. That's not safe. That's not
(25:11):
safe for me the leader. What I tell them is,
first of all, if I started at one hundred percent,
hypothetically more than they believe that they earned, then they're
going to behave in a more trustworthy way. I'm going
to find that they're a little less trustworthy than I
thought they are, but we're going to meet somewhere high,
(25:31):
pretty high. If, on the other hand, they're right there
in the middle and I started zero, I'm going to
find that they're more trustworthy than I thought. So they're
starting to earn my trust, but they feel that I
don't trust them, their trustworthiness goes down. We're going to
meet again, but in a much, much lower place. What
I always recommend is trust your people just a little
(25:56):
more than you believe they earn. They need to feel
this little gap of you trusting them slightly ahead of
what they believe they earn and deserve for this to
keep spiraling up instead of spiraling down.
Speaker 4 (26:12):
That's brilliant as a leader. And I would say as
a team member, And we've had David Horseger on here
the show, and he's talked a lot about trust as well,
also from a team member perspective and building that trust
with your leader, because as a team member, you want
to make sure that your trust level is high enough
(26:32):
so that especially if the leader does follow your suggestion,
now they're trusting you to a great deal and giving
you more of those responsibilities and privileges. So as a
team member, David in his recent book goes over a
whole bunch of tools for trust.
Speaker 2 (26:48):
I know you have a bunch as well.
Speaker 4 (26:50):
What are a couple of those really powerful tools that
you can use as a team member to earn a
higher degree of trust.
Speaker 2 (26:57):
Well, so the interesting thing is that the framework that
I built with those eight laws of trust and the
six components of trust, what I call my relative trust,
my relative trust model. They are the concept is universal.
It applies to every relationship. So the same things that
(27:19):
apply to a leader I need to think about, you know,
the transferable Let's start with the transferability of trust. Okay,
trust law number five? What am I as a leader
doing to make sure that my team members get an
independent confirmation that I'm someone that they can trust? Same
thing as a team member? What am I as a
(27:40):
team member doing for my new leader to get an
independent confirmation that I am someone that they can trust.
All the components, you know, the components of competency, Just
that we're showing competents in different areas. As a leader,
my competence is in how good did I lead other teams?
Right As a team member, what am I doing in
(28:03):
the team? I'm a salesperson, My competence is how good
am I as a salesperson? So the model is the same.
It's actually funny because Jim mentioned a series of my
minibooks cold Can I Trust You? So while the Book
of Trust, the Minibook of Trust, they are more generic.
They talk about trust in general in every relationship I
(28:27):
wrote so far five mini books like one hundred page each.
They talk about specific roles and how does this apply
to them? So, for example, one of those books is
sixty seven plus one Habits that will make you a
trust worthy leader, So this is how does this framework
apply to leaders? Another one is seventy two plus one
(28:49):
habits that. Oh, I'm sorry, it's the other way around.
Seventy two plus one is for leaders. The sixty seven
plus one is how sixty seven plus one habits they
will make you a trustworthy team member. You're not going
to ask about the plus one, aren't you? Well explained, Okay,
So first of all, it's simply because I can only
(29:12):
count until seventy two. So once it went one more,
I'm like, it's seventy two plus one. Somebody do the
math for me. But now, in reality, in all seriousness,
the reason for the plus one is because the plus
one is unique and it's common to all of them.
That's one habit that's common to all relationships, and that
(29:37):
is that you're not going to be trusted by everyone
except that Walter Cronkite was the most trusted man by
seventy two percent of the voters, not one hundred percent.
You're not going to be trusted by everyone. If you
are not trusted by someone that you need to be trusted. Now,
I don't need to be trusted by everyone, you know,
(29:59):
but there are people I I do need to be
trusted by, especially people who rely on what I do.
If you rely on what I do, then I need
to be trusted by you. And if you don't trust
me yet you have to rely on what I do.
We have a problem. So what if I'm not trusted
by someone I need to be trusted by. First, I
(30:21):
need to understand why why is it that I'm not trusted.
Maybe it's competence. Maybe I'm not competent enough for this role.
So what do we do? I get trained, I shift
to another role or something. But if I don't have
the competence required to do this role better, maybe you know,
take a smaller role or something. But if I can't
(30:43):
do this role the way it was intended to, we
need to fix this. Change my role train me whatever.
The most that it happens is about shared values. It's
about personality compatibility, or I should say personality incompatibility. We're
(31:05):
not compatible personally. Well, now the question is, once we
can identify what is it? Is it important enough for me,
the person who needs to be trusted to change? Is
it important enough for the person who needs to trust
to change? How important is it? Can I change? And
(31:33):
do I have the willingness to change?
Speaker 1 (31:36):
So?
Speaker 2 (31:37):
You know, One of the examples that I like to
give is when I worked in Texas instruments, I went
to my boss and I had renuma, just like you.
I had all kinds of ideas and I was going
there and presenting ideas to her, and I could feel
(31:57):
that almost always she would have an immediate allergic reaction
to what I was suggesting. Almost always an allergic reaction.
Didn't like it. Well, at some point I was trying
to understand why, and in something you know, her immediate
allergic reaction made me ask this question, do you prefer
(32:22):
for me? And this goes back again rhuma to to
sending the business planner or sending the LinkedIn profile? Do
you prefer for me to give you the bottom line
first of what I'm asking for, and then explain the
rationale or take you through my thought process and end
(32:42):
with the bottom line. Now, I'm a bottom line first person.
As it turns out, so is seventy six percent of
the people that I asked in the survey. Give me
the bottom line. The bottom line gives me context. So
everything else you say will support or reject whatever you
told me as the bottom line. She was the opposite.
(33:04):
She said, every time you give me the bottom line
and I don't have the foundation for it, I don't
have what your thought process was, I immediately find what's wrong
with it, and then it's hard for me to even
listen to you later. So was it important for me
to be to be trusted or relied by her? Let's
(33:27):
start with that. So I was relied by her. She
had to rely on me because I was running one
hundred million dollar business unit with eighty nine people for her.
So it was important for her to be able to
trust me. Was it something that I was capable of changing? Yeah,
when I meet with her, I need to remember, don't
(33:50):
start with the bottom line, take her through your thought process.
From that moment on, her level of trust in me
went up.
Speaker 6 (34:01):
So I'm and this is so important that trust level
on others, and I often I experience it with my
previous chairperson as well, because if you don't have positivity
or open mindedness, and if you also have some stereotypical
understanding of the other person, often that trust mutual trust
(34:23):
doesn't happen, and you have to do something extra to
earn that trust. Trust. But unfortunately, we are in a
world where a fear is dictating so many of our
foundation of relationships. So I'm fearful of the other person.
I'm fearful of this group and that group, and that
is why it's often that trust we need to build
(34:46):
to build that world that we are aspiring to, it's
not happening. And one of the reasons I'm thinking about
is our leaders sometimes need to be vulnerable, showing that
I'm not confident always I do not know the answer.
So what is your take on the importance of vulnerability
(35:07):
to build that trust among everybody else?
Speaker 2 (35:11):
Two hundred and forty percent? What's your next question? Maybe
a little more detail? Is so actually in one of
my studies, and it is in the Book of Trust.
In one of my surveys, I try to correlate the component.
Three components actually the component of vulnerability. It's my willingness
(35:32):
to ask stupid questions and not worry about what you're
going to say. My willingness to suggest stupid ideas and
not worry about what you have to say, my vulnerability
in general. The second one was my willingness to give
you the feedback that you need to hear, not the
feedback I think you want to hear. And the third
(35:53):
one is my receptivity to that kind of feedback that
comes from you or too stupid ideas or stupid questions.
How receptive I am. So, first of all, before I
even get there, what I found was that here are
two things that are closely related. Trust within the team
or in a relationship, and the willingness and ability to
(36:17):
hold what I call a constructive disagreement. So, a constructive
disagreement is where we can discuss everything. It's the most optimal,
the most effective way of arguing. I can say anything,
I will listen to everything that you say. On the
other two extremes, we have the destructive disagreement. This is
where everything becomes personal, emotional, and irrational. This is when
(36:41):
it's not your idea that stupid. It's you are stupid.
Then on the other side is what we call and
we have way too much of that, the politically correct disagreement.
This is where we have the meeting before the meeting,
the meeting after the meeting, just not the meeting during
the meeting, you know what I mean. It's where the
things get closed outside of the conference room. So we
(37:04):
need to be in that effective one. And what I
found was that when I ask people how comfortable are
you in holding a disagreement in general in a high
trust environment, sixty one percent of people said they are
(37:24):
uncomfortable holding disagreement. Disagreements are not effective. They would try
everything they can to avoid the disagreement sixty one percent.
Only thirty one percent said that they embrace a disagreement
in a low trust environment. In a high trust and
I think I said the way. In a low trust environment,
sixty one percent say we try to avoid disagreement at
(37:46):
all costs. In a high trust environment, that sixty one
percent becomes six percent. Wow, ninety four percent feel more
comfortable disagreement. But back to your question about vulnerable, I
trust two for two hundred and forty percent correlated with
vulnerability two hundred and forty percent correlated with vulnerability one
(38:10):
hundred and six percent correlated with the willingness, the willingness
to give you the feedback that you need to hear,
not what I think you want to hear. And this
goes back to what we talked about before the show
about my my upcoming book about evaluating ideas and what
I tell my students at SMU. I tell them what
they need to know, not what I feel they want
(38:32):
to hear. So it's going to be somebody else's problem
at the end. And the third one, the receptivity is
seventy six percent higher in a high trust environment. But
you're right for NUMA. By the way, this is a cycle.
The more vulnerable I am, the more you're going to
trust me. The more you're going to trust me, the
more I'm going to feel that I can be vulnerable.
Speaker 6 (38:54):
And this is so true because I run a nonprofit
with one hundred plus volunteers and ten executive members and
board of directors, and we have so much disagreement at
every meeting, but it never broke our trust on each other.
So I will openly tell them that I do not
know the answer. Help me out if anything goes wrong,
(39:16):
I admit and others admit, and they're learning from me because,
as coach always said, lead by example. When I'm admitting
my mistakes, now if my team members are also making
any mistakes, they will admit it instead of hiding. And
this I created. I'm fortunate enough and blessed enough to
have that powerful team who are very comfortable with disagreements
(39:39):
and they're not always trying to make me feel good.
Speaker 2 (39:44):
I agree when you said that you say that you
don't know, it's I don't know and I'll find out
right right. It's this one is much harder. I was wrong,
very hard for people to say I was wrong. By
the way, once you mastered that I was wrong, there
(40:04):
is an advanced version, but that's you know, don't try
that at home after saying I was wrong, try staying
and you were right.
Speaker 5 (40:18):
I could talk to you all day. Yes, the boss
of things we do got to dove in. We're getting
close to the end of our time. But with your
new book about ideas, can you share about that, because
you know, one of the things we talked about is
your nobs style and you know, and you talked a
little bit about ideas before we started broadcasting the show,
(40:41):
so share some about the book here and about ideas definitely.
Speaker 2 (40:46):
So the class that I built and back in twenty
eighteen and i'm teaching and now five times a year,
is called Evaluating Entrepreneurial Opportunities, And it's really about how
do you evaluate the idea? You know, I've heard so
many times. First of all, everything is a great idea, right,
No it's not. No, it's not. If you know the statistics,
(41:08):
and they're there in the book at the beginning of
the book, your probability of success is almost zero. And
I just, you know, hypothetically, said let's call it one
in one hundred. By the way, it's less than one
in one hundred, so it's one in three thousand. Those
research that showed that one in three thousand ideas actually
reach a commercial viability. So let's say it's one in
(41:30):
one hundred. The probability that you have a great idea,
that you started with a great idea is almost nothing.
And what I tell my students the first thing is
never fall in love with your idea or with your solution.
Always fall in love with the problem or the pain
that you're addressing, because when you fall in love with
(41:53):
the pain with the problem, you're going to solve it.
When you fall in love with your idea, you're going
to ignore the fact that it doesn't solve the pain.
And that is the number one reason why ideas fail.
One of the other things that I was telling my
students all the time is, look, this class is not
about telling you how rade your idea is. It's about
telling you how soon. It's about teaching you how quickly
(42:15):
can you kill it? Because even if your odds are
one in one hundred, you need to kill ninety nine ideas.
So I'm going to teach you how to quickly, quickly
quickly kill them. Well, as it turns out, so this
and I told you before since we talked, I think
a couple of months ago, I accidentally wrote another book.
(42:37):
So that's that's the new book that I just finished
writing the first draft. So now it's editing and everything else.
But I just woke up one morning and I said,
there is no textbook about it. And you know, I
don't know if I'm going to wake up tomorrow morning.
Well there's the storms and all, but you know, you
(42:59):
don't know if you're going to wake up tomorrow morning.
My PhD dissertation committee chair and mentor. When I was
almost done with the dissertation, about to submit chapter five,
I get a call from the university. He went to
sleep Monday night and did not wake up Tuesday morning.
We don't know if we're going to wake up. There
is no textbook that covers this part. All the textbooks,
(43:22):
all the books that are being used in entrepreneurship programs
throughout the nation touch on it, and that's it. And
we're afraid to say this is a bad idea. So
I started writing this book, and you know, my thought was,
this is going to be like a five y eight tiny,
one hundred and fifty page book. I stopped at three
(43:46):
hundred and fifty pages of very you know, small line
spacing at six by nine. So this is I'm writing
it as a textbook on evaluating ideas. And you know
the name of the book. And unfortunately it's going to
take me a while to share with you the design.
The it's great idea, big capital letters, great idea, and
(44:10):
then in hand written font it says, is it really
a great idea?
Speaker 4 (44:18):
And that's the question we all have to ask ourselves
as entrepreneurs, because we do fall in love with those
ideas so much that we try to get them to work,
and really, we're fitting a square peg into a round hole, right,
and it's just not working and causing more and more frustration.
And I have to ask you too, as we come
up on the end, doctor Salmon, when it comes to
(44:39):
entrepreneurship oftentimes, like I love the Donald Miller, like the
story brand kind of Yeah, yeah, really, where we're talking
about being the guide and not the hero. That's what
I was going to ask you. As an entrepreneur, how
do we shift our mindset with our ideas as well,
going from being that hero who has the solution to
(45:02):
being somebody who can work you through the problem and
be malleable enough to realize that our solution isn't always
the best solution.
Speaker 2 (45:11):
Yeah. So, first of all, I had you saw that
I was smiling when you talked about a square peg
in a round hole. And the reason is because that's
the drawing on the cover of the book. It's a
square peg. Ind I mean, it's it's a very cool
way and you know, believe it or not, I did
not use a designer, you know who designed that cover
(45:34):
image for me ai jet GPT wow, I said with
cheed GPT and I said, what would be a concept
of bad ideas? You know, it's not a great idea.
And the first concept that came back with wash, square peg,
round hole. And we were going back and forth. I mean,
this is like two hundred different versions as we were
(45:56):
together building the cover. It's it's a beautiful cover, emails.
But you know again, I can share it now. However,
so if you go through the process of that book,
that book goes through a process and it is six tests.
And by the way, that's what I do in my class.
(46:17):
The book comes out of what I've been teaching for
the last seven years. Six tests. How do you let
go of your idea? Because you start with who the
customer is, and you start by a definition of the customer.
And I always tell my students when they come back
and say, oh, our customer is between the ages of
(46:38):
twenty six and sixty five, above average income in urban environment,
It's like that says nothing about your customer. That says
nothing about your customer. Your customer has to be unique enough.
Any of you left handed by any chance? Yeah, actually, hello, okay,
(46:59):
what is that you're not getting? What is it that's
hard for you to get to.
Speaker 4 (47:03):
Find well, several different things. I don't open cans very
well with manual can openers.
Speaker 2 (47:09):
Yes, there are a lot of things. By the way,
in case you didn't get it, I'm left handed too,
and we know there are things that are not catered
to us. If you try to define your customer as
someone in the area of entrepreneurship and edgend professor or
something like this, we're both going to fall into it.
(47:29):
But so many other people that are not suffering from
a pain that you and I are suffering being left handed. Yeah,
so it's more about the psychographic than the demographic of
your audience. So there's this part a good evaluation, and
I actually created a tool to evaluate your customer thirteen
(47:50):
elements and scoring and everything. How do you value or
score do you have the right customer? The second is
is it a strong enough as severe enough pain so
you know, think of it in these terms. Are you
giving them a painkiller, a vitamin or candy? Think about it.
(48:16):
Painkiller I need right now, A vitamin I need to
save myself from something in the future. Candy It's nice
to have. I'd like candy right now. Does it help
me in any way. No, it doesn't. What is it
that you're offering a painkiller, a vitamin or candy. The
third one is the value to price ratio of your
(48:39):
product and how different is it from everything else that
everything else that's available, or what I call the best
current alternative. So that's actually the topic of the class
that we have tonight. It's the third week, so it's
the third test. The fourth test is the prototype and
that's what they're going to do next week. How do
(49:01):
we This is where robber meets the road. The fifth
test is a sustainable competitive advantage. You know, it's not
enough that you have a great idea that really solves
a problem. Everything is good except you can't protect it.
And the sixth one is does it really create profit
not only to you, but enough motivation for everyone you
(49:25):
need to participate in the value chain. It's not enough
that it brings profit to your company. Anyone you rely
on has to make a profit or somehow be motivated
enough to participate. So this is kind of you can
see as I'm taking you through it that I am
almost forcing yourself to detach yourself from the idea itself
(49:49):
and focus more on the analysis.
Speaker 4 (49:53):
Wow, I love that. I you know, I might want
to connect with you doctor Solomon too, just because we
do have a lot of overlap as far as the
class that I teach here at the college more on
the marketing side of things, but we talk about things
like demographics, psychographics, and I'm definitely going to be checking
out your book when it comes out, so I will
(50:13):
definitely stay up on you and one of your first
book customers, because that's going to be a really great
book to help me better communicate those principles to my students.
So thank you for sharing all that.
Speaker 2 (50:27):
The plan is very simple. This book needs to be
available for students to purchase two weeks before the beginning
of the full semester.
Speaker 4 (50:36):
Okay, well that's that's going to be an aggressive timeline, right,
but I believe you can note.
Speaker 2 (50:41):
Three hundred and fifty pages in two and a half weeks.
Speaker 6 (50:47):
It's great.
Speaker 2 (50:47):
By the wait, this is not chet GPT wrote my book, right,
chet GPT. You know what chet GPT did. I wrote
a chapter and it cut it in half. It said
half the things you wrote there are not needed. What
cha GIPT did to me. That's why I don't talk
to it anymore.
Speaker 6 (51:04):
You don't trust, you don't trust chat GPT.
Speaker 2 (51:07):
No disappointed me, But seriously, it's one of the classes
that I did that I give in the National Speakers
Association is how to really use chat gipt to write books.
The whole idea of that this is a textbook, just
to kind of give you something about that was at
some point I asked Chad Gipt, now think about this question.
(51:29):
What would Mark Cuban, Ery Crease and Steve Blank say
about this book? You have the book, they haven't. What
would they say? Now? I asked it to be bluntly
honest with me, brutally honest with me. It said, well,
here's what Mark Cuban would say. And and again, you know,
it learns Mark Cuban, it knows how Mark Cuban speaks,
(51:51):
and so on it goes, get to the goddamn point. Already,
this is too long, This is too much analysis. This
is entrepreneurs need to be out there in market. And
then he said, this was an amazing line. Drop the classrooms,
drop the classroom angle. I'm not wait a minute, I'm
(52:13):
writing a textbook. I'm not writing an entrepreneurship book. I'm
writing a textbook. Then I asked, what would a renowned
entrepreneurship professor say about this book? So it started digging
up Harvard, Stanford, Mit, do you call the you know,
the big programs entrepreneurship program the professors. I even got
(52:36):
a raving review from Clayton Christensen, who died five years ago.
But that was yes. So that was just so that
you know, I told you that I wrote the book
in two and a half weeks. I misled you a
little because I spent four weeks on the outline. Four
(52:58):
weeks on the outline, going back and forth is that needed?
Here is the right flow? And start blowing up the
outline into specific paragraphs. So this is what I'm going
to write here, This is what I'm going to write here,
and keep on revising and revising. Four weeks I spend
on revising, going back and forth on the outline. Once
I was down with the outline two and a half
(53:20):
weeks to write three hundred and fifty pages.
Speaker 4 (53:21):
Wow, and really seven hundred pages because they cut that
in half.
Speaker 2 (53:25):
So not to old chapters.
Speaker 4 (53:29):
Doctor Yorm Solomon has written books for entrepreneurs, for academics,
living and dead. He's communicating with all types of people
here and we love that. And especially for the entrepreneur
or just the person, the leader or team member who
wants to build trust. What's the best way to learn
more about you? Which of your twenty and a half
(53:52):
books should we start with? And how can we get
in touch if there are any ways to do that.
Speaker 2 (53:58):
So obviously as far as which one of the twenty
one books, because by the time if this show airs
it right now, it's August twentieth, and the book is out,
the book is out, So it's twenty one books. Which
one to start with? It depends on what you want
to know if you want to understand trust. Jim already
(54:20):
said that he got the Minibook of Trust because I
felt it was cruel and unusual punishment to give him
the Book of Trust that is five hundred and fifty
pages five hundred and fifty pages long, and so I
sent Jim the Minibook of Trust much easier. So I
always recommend for people, if you're interested in trust, get
(54:44):
the Minibook of Trust. Maybe get one of the five
minibooks for the different roles like consultant, advisor, project manager,
and so on, So that might be a good starting
point you you read the Mini Book of Trust and
you go, this was really good, but I need to
(55:05):
go a level deeper. I need to understand the background.
That's when you get the Book of Trust. That's if
you care about trust, if you care about entrepreneurship. Then
several different books. One is it really a great idea
coming out? Well, already came out since we're in August.
The second one is my first book ever, Bowling with
(55:27):
a Crystal Ball, How to find opportunities in technology and
how to capitalize them and navigate them through industry. Book
number four Unkilled Creativity. You know, we keep thinking about
creativity coming from startups, which, by the way, the topic
of my research, my PhD research was why are people
so much more creative when they work for small startup
(55:50):
companies than when they work for large, mature companies. That
was the topic and book number four came out of it.
It's called Unkilled Creativity. How Corporate America can out innovate
to startups. Culture Starts with You, Not Your Boss is
another small book about organizational culture. So it really depends
on what you want to know in terms of which book.
(56:12):
Oh and of course book number two Worst Died Ever,
How to lose weight and leave healthy. Believe me. That
was book number two, which was really not a book
about weight loss. It's a book about how do you
find the motivation to do the things that are important
but long term over the things that are much less
important but immediate. That led to the process that I
(56:35):
call the Trust Habits that's covered in the Book of Trust.
Easiest way to find me your Solomon dot com y
O R A M S O L O M O
N dot com, Trust Habits dot com. Same website and
listen to it's free The Trust Show podcast, The Trust Show.
Speaker 6 (56:54):
I need to Yeah, I need to allocate a sheef
for you.
Speaker 2 (57:00):
That's the idea.
Speaker 4 (57:02):
Yeah, the your Michelle Fiaz The Trust Show podcast available.
Speaker 2 (57:05):
By the way, I er marketing, sales and everything, and
I have ash out for your books.
Speaker 4 (57:13):
Make your next podcast. Listen to the Trust Show podcast.
That'll be on any of those platforms that you found
us on. Doctor orm Solomon, thank you so much for
your time today and everything you shared about trust, entrepreneurship,
and so much more. We really appreciate your time and
your insight.
Speaker 2 (57:29):
It was great being with you.
Speaker 3 (57:30):
Thank you for joining us this week at the Limitless
Leadership Lounge. To listen to this episode again and to
find previous episodes, check us out on Apple Podcasts, Spotify,
and Spreaker. You can also get in on the conversation
find us on Facebook and Instagram, then tell three of
your friends to join in as well. Coach Brnuma and John.
We'll be back again next week for another try generational
(57:52):
leadership discussion. We'll talk to you then on the Limitless
Leadership Lounge
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