Excerpt from the Experts
The Speed of Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everything
Following is a sample excerpt from Stephen Covey Jr.’s book. Trust is often viewed as a soft skill. Covey and LAG have proven that soft skills produce hard results.
The following excerpt comes from Chapter 1 – Nothing is as Fast as the Speed of Trust.
When trust is high, speed goes up and cost goes down. Consider the example of Warren Buffett – CEO of Berkshire Hathaway (and generally considered one of the most trusted leaders in the world) – who recently completed a major acquisition of McLane Distribution (a $23 billion company) from Wal-Mart. As public companies, both Berkshire Hathaway and Wal-Mart are subject to all kinds of market and regulatory scrutiny. Typically, a merger of this size would take several months to complete and cost several million dollars to pay for accountants, auditors and attorneys to verify and validate all kinds of information. But in this instance, because both parties operated with high trust, the deal was made with one two-hour meeting and a handshake. In less than a month, it was completed.
In a management letter that accompanied his 2004 annual report, Buffett wrote: “We did no ‘due-diligence’. We knew everything would be exactly as Wal-Mart said it would be – and it was.”
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