Although it involves risk, human beings have a very primal need to give and receive trust. As author, playwright and part-time spy Graham Greene put it: “It is impossible to go through life without trust: That is to be imprisoned in the worse cell of all, oneself.”
No greater evidence of this need to make a connection exists than the popularity of various “social networking” sites such as Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn. In each case, an individual not only puts himself or herself out there for the world to see—an act of trust in and of itself. They also trust that the people they know will lead them to others who can also be trusted, thus expanding their world beyond the geographic, socio-economic and political boundaries that have traditionally defined our social circles. In fact, that is their purpose—to make connections that otherwise would not be possible.
Still, trust at the social level is relatively easy to establish. After all, we have a history with the people who are part of our inner circle, with “performance metrics” sometimes established over a lifetime. We know what to expect from them and they know what to expect from us.
At the business level, it has never been so easy. Think about the huge leap of faith merchants took roughly 500 years ago with the establishment of the “Silk Road” between Europe and Asia, the overseas trade routes between Europe and the New World and other long-distance trading. Until that time, trading was a fairly immediate activity. You give me rice today and I’ll give you milk today; you give me an axe head today and I’ll give you gold coins. And so on. There was an element of trust involved: You trust that the milk I’m giving you is fresh and I trust that the rice you’re giving me is edible—but the immediacy of the transaction meant that little trust was required beyond it.
Long-distance trading required different rules of trust due to two things—time and infrastructure. It took months to travel back and forth between East Asia and Europe, while cargo-laden ships and caravans were expensive to operate and protect. Buyers had to trust that their shipments would arrive on time (or at all) and in good condition; sellers had to trust that payments would be good. It was a long way to go if either side didn’t fulfill the terms of the deal. Trust, by economic necessity, went from existing in the present tense to existing in the future tense.
This was the way of the world for the last 500 years. While various improvements were made along the way, the model still held. Buyers and sellers built the trusted networks based on long-term experience and their contacts and conducted business much as they always had.
