Interview with Charles H. Green, Trusted Advisor Associates, Part 1
Friday, July 3rd, 2009
Trust. It is a hot issue and there is a good reason for that.
With that, we at Egyii will be doing a series of interviews and Podcasts with the leaders in Trust, in anticipation of our August announcement on our new programme on Trust.
The first of the series is Charles H. Green, one of the founding fathers of the “trust movement ” and founder/CEO of Trusted Advisor Associates. He is the author of Trust Based Selling and co-author of The Trusted Advisor. His expertise is in trusted relationships in business. For more on Charlie, click here.
Here is Part 1.
The following is transcribed from a recorded session.
Trip Allen: On this session of the Egyii edge, we have Charles H. Green of Trust Advisor Associates. Today the topic is ‘Trust’.
Tell us about your background and why you became so passionate about trust?
Charlie Green: The main driver was that I spent 20 years working in the management consulting business, 10 as a management consultant and 10 helping to run the firm.
What I learned about that business was that you are selling “air,” in a way. It’s a very intangible, non unphysical kind of a service. You are selling it through people who are very bright and driven, and also little neurotic, who can’t quite get enough feedback.
You are selling this intangible “stuff” from smart people to people who manage the whole enterprise, are a little suspicious and often equally as bright. From that, I found that trust had an awful lot to do with it.
What I also found was that the clients could not compete with the consultants in terms of expertise, so the situation is a bit like a doctor- clients find it somewhat intimidating. Ultimately, the clients themselves didn’t like to be controlled either. So, the whole thing is very much run on the principles of trust, from selling in the firms to leadership of the firms.
So, as I got older and looked at more clients and businesses, I began to see general patterns of trust emerging in how businesses get run. So it’s from my personal experiences -that’s where it came from.
Trip Allen: About 9 years ago you really hit the streets with a book called “The Trusted Advisor,” which you co-authored in 2000. Today, it is a very well known, well respected book and programme. So tell us about what impact the book had on the business world at that time?
Charlie Green: Well, it wasn’t one of the “big splash” books, but at the same time it was an idea where we hit the timing just right. The phrase “trusted advisor” had some resonance with people already in a lot of different professions like accounting, law, consulting, public relations, advertising, etc and it turns out it’s rather an annuity and it sells about 5 or 7 thousand copies a year.
I think the reason is you get to a certain point in your career in public accounting or consulting or any of these consultative related business, or any business at all, and you then feel you have a need to go buy “The Trusted Adviser.” So it’s turned out be like a little bit of an annuity. We don’t make a lot of money on it but it is always out there.
Trip Allen: Let me ask another question, since the “Trusted Advisor” book, what changes have you seen in the area of trust? Over the past 9 years certainly a lot has happened.
Charlie Green: Well, yes. The most obvious thing is that in the past couple of years and months, the term “trust” has taken another whole new level of awareness in terms of visibility.
People suddenly raised it to a whole new level of business awareness and it’s obviously because of the recession and the great dramatic events that happened in the financial sector over the past several years.
And lot of that has to do with systemic failures of trust; trust at the individual level, trust at the organisational level and in some ways particularly at the institutional and social level.
It’s become relatively obvious when you get people like Bernie Madoff, that everybody can look at and say “wow, what a failure of trust, look what happened to the people who trusted him, we thought he was trustworthy, he wasn’t.”
I think the past 4 or 5 years in the financial sector have been the single biggest reason for the growth of trust and, depending upon what measure you look at, the decline of trusting and trustworthiness among people and businesses.
End of Part 1. To be continued…
Trip Allen, Team Egyii, Singapore
