Trust Across America-Trust Around the World™

When trust is low, fear is high, and fear is very costly.

Numerous studies have shown that:

• High-trust organizations consistently outperform their rivals
• Trust is the foundation of high performing teams
• Trust reduces employee turnover and increases engagement
• Trust increases productivity and innovation
• High trust leads to long-term business success, beyond just short-term “home runs.”

What is your organization doing to cut the losses of low trust?

The “fix” is relatively easy and inexpensive. And it begins by acknowledging that low trust is costing you money. Like a disease, if low trust is ignored, it continues to spread.

Our newest Trust Tool is based on our Trust Alliance Principles (TAP), the result of the collaborative efforts of dozens of the world’s leading trust scholars and practitioners. Since April, these principles have been accessed over 40,000 times in 16 languages. This tool will provide any team (including the Board of Directors,) or organization of any size in any industry, with a simple roadmap to track and elevate trust.

Want to learn more? Contact barbara@trustacrossamerica.com

Barbara Brooks Kimmel is an award-winning communications executive and the CEO and Cofounder of Trust Across America-Trust Around the World whose mission is to help organizations build trust. A former consultant to McKinsey and many Fortune 500 CEOs and their firms, Barbara also runs the world’s largest global Trust Alliance, and is the editor of the award-winning TRUST INC. book series and TRUST! Magazine.  Barbara holds a BA in International Affairs and an MBA. Don’t forget to TAP into Trust!

Copyright(c) 2019, Next Decade, Inc.

The trust “talk” is increasing in frequency and volume, and that’s a good thing. Or is it?

At least leaders are thinking about it. Yet when it comes to defining trust, those same people are either getting stuck (at best) or using the word “trust” as a placeholder (at worst.) When trust is misdefined or misidentified, it not only gets diluted, but stakeholder cynicism quickly builds.  If you choose to talk it, keep in mind that trust takes many forms, each with it own distinct definition. Make sure you are using the right one!

Trust:  (the noun)

Trust: (the verb)

Trustor: (noun)

Trustee: (noun)

Trustworthy: (adjective)

Trusting: (gerund)

Propensity to trust

For those who want (or need) a refresher course, Charlie Green and I wrote this article, complete with definitions (and much more,) almost 3 years ago. And if you want to see how you are doing in the “trust department,” we offer this brand new one-minute quiz. How are you defining trust and how does your organization compare to others?

Copyright 2019, Next Decade, Inc.

Celebrating Our 5th anniversary!

Formed in 2013, we are a growing collaborative community focused exclusively on elevating organizational trust by providing enlightened leaders with the “right” tools and resources. Unlike other think tanks, we have advanced our “thinking” to action.

The past twelve months represented a “banner year” for the Alliance as we completed the following projects:

Trust Alliance Project Highlights

• Named our first 12-member Trust Council comprised of Alliance members who have taken an active role with us in building organizational trust programs over the years.
• Published our 10th anniversary TRUST! Magazine spring issue, highlighting good governance practices. It’s a gem and should be read by every Board member everywhere!
• Members contributed to our growing case study library called Trustlets.
• Dozens of hours were spent coordinating and consulting on TAP (Trust Alliance Principles). Phase II has now begun with a new project launching on January 29, 2019.
• Global members helped construct our first annual Country Trust Index.
• The 4th annual Showcase of Service Providers was published.
• Our 10th anniversary report “Trust & Integrity in Corporate America” (available at www.trustacrossamerica.com ) features the work of many Alliance member, and we published this “2 pager” under the Research tab on our website.

What’s Ahead?

In 2019 we began arming our members with a new actionable trust “tool” delivered every month through our member newsletter.

Why Not Join Us?

If you are interested in rolling up your sleeves and participating with a group of collaborative global professionals, we’d love to consider you for membership.

(Some of our members have been kind enough to add their thoughts on this testimonials page.)

Questions or comments? Feel free to send your thoughts along.

Barbara Brooks Kimmel, CEO and Chief Trust Officer

Copyright 2019, Next Decade, Inc.

Trust Across America-Trust Around the World’s free

2019 Calendar and Poster

provide ideas to start the trust discussion.

Will 2019 be the year when you become an enlightened leader?

Register to receive these tools via the home page of our website.

If you have any questions, comments or ideas, we are here to listen.

Copyright 2019, Next Decade, Inc.

How can organizations ensure that

red lights turn green in 2019?

Please share your ideas.

Is this a useful resource to you and your organization? Please consider making a donation to help us build more tools.

You have been the victim of a major trust breach and you may not know it.

To how many of the following do you subscribe? If you are reading this, you certainly have an account with at least one of these services! Were you notified about the attacks that stole both your email address AND your password?

• Adobe: 153 million accounts
• Bitly: 9.3 million accounts
• Disqus: 17.5 million accounts
• Forbes: 1 million accounts
• LinkedIn: 164 million accounts
• Dropbox: 68 million accounts
• Ancestry: 297,806

You can view the full list here. In total and as of this moment, 517,238,891 passwords have been exposed to data breaches.

Source: www.haveIbeenpwned.com

I was not aware of the magnitude of this problem until yesterday’s most recent “spoof” appeared in my inbox demanding a bitcoin ransom. I’ve received a few in the past, (after the first one it becomes less scary!) but this was different. Not only was it sent from my OWN email address, but it contained an old password that I had used to register for some of the services shown above.

Before you freak out about the next ransomware demand coming to your inbox, check this website to see if you’ve been “had.” Chances are you have, and it’s time to stop using the same old passwords.

Find this information valuable?

Please consider making a small donation by clicking here!

Barbara Brooks Kimmel is an award-winning communications executive and the CEO and Cofounder of Trust Across America-Trust Around the World whose mission is to help organizations build trust. A former consultant to McKinsey and many Fortune 500 CEOs and their firms, Barbara also runs the world’s largest global Trust Alliance, and is the editor of the award-winning TRUST INC. book series and TRUST! Magazine. In 2012 she was named one of “25 Women who are Changing the World” by Good Business International, and in 2017 she became a Fellow of the Governance & Accountability Institute. Barbara holds a BA in International Affairs and an MBA. Don’t forget to TAP into Trust!

For more information contact barbara@trustacrossamerica.com

Copyright(c) 2019, Next Decade, Inc.

In 2018 Trust Across America-Trust Around the World celebrated its 10th anniversary. We are a collaborative social enterprise whose mission is to help organizations build trust. Highlights of our progress can be reviewed on this timeline. As our programs expanded this past year, we attracted almost 300,000 global visitors to our website and over 30,000 professionals have joined our TAP movement.

While we will always be interested in connecting with others who share our vision, we must also remain committed to the most urgent “task at hand” which is building new tools to help our community move its work forward. We are “doers” not “talkers” and “doing” requires time, energy and focus.

What does this mean going forward?

As of January 15th, we will be sharing new content and original though leadership less frequently on social media and will be deleting many of our current connections. The bulk of our efforts will be directed to those in our community who are:

1. Members of our Trust Alliance
2. Members of our broader network via subscription to our mailing list
3. Have donated to our program
4. Have actively participated in any of our recent ongoing projects
5. Have reached out directly with something other than a sales pitch!

Click on any of the five links listed above to remain involved, or simply send me a note.

Best wishes to all for a 2019 filled with more trust, success and good health.

Barbara Brooks Kimmel, CEO & Cofounder, Trust Across America-Trust Around the World

Copyright 2019, Next Decade, Inc.

In celebration of the 10th anniversary of Trust Across America-Trust Around the World, our global Trust Alliance “elves” have spent the year hammering away at new (and free) tools to elevate organizational trust in any organization regardless of size, location or industry.

We are happy to provide our readers with “12 days of organizational trust resources.”

Trust Across America’s FACTS® Framework: Fast Facts

(a summary of our 10th anniversary 46-page report “Trust & Integrity in Corporate America 2018” )

Introduction: Developed by a cross-silo multidisciplinary team, and in the wake of the financial crisis in 2008, the Framework evolved with the goal of creating a long-term model to reduce corporate risk and maximize profitability by measuring trust. With the assistance of professionals from leadership, compliance and ethics, governance, accounting, finance, HR, consulting, corporate social responsibility, ESG, sustainability, and other disciplines, FACTS® was finalized in 2010.

Methodology: Now in its 9th year, Trust Across America performs an independent annual analysis using its rigorous and unique FACTS® Framework. Companies do not participate, nor do they know they are being analyzed.

How we define trust: A byproduct of strong core values that are practiced and reinforced daily.

The FACTS® Framework:

The Framework incorporates proprietary metrics and measures the trust “worthiness” of public companies based on five equally weighted indicators that form the FACTS® acronym: Financial stability, Accounting Conservativeness, Corporate Integrity, Transparency & Sustainability. Additional screens may include but are not limited to fines and violations, percentage of women on the board, CEO pay ratios and tenure, employee reviews and news. Our analysis has never identified a “perfect” company. In fact, on our 1-100 scale, it is unusual for a company to score above an 80%. In 2018, 103 companies in the Russell 1000 scored a 70% or above. The full list is provided in our research report.

Measuring Outcomes and Impacts: On average, and over the long-term, the “Top 10″ most trustworthy public companies have outperformed the S&P 500 by over 25% since inception. In each of the six full years, the selected group has had a higher return than the S&P 500. (June, 2018)

Sector analysis: FACTS® data is sorted by sector and the following chart represents the sector rankings for the Russell 1000 for 2018. FACTS® uses Zacks Investment Research that divides date into 16 sectors. Others like S&P and Morningstar sometimes place companies in different sectors. For example, Zacks financial sector includes banks, insurance companies, REITS and brokerage firms, to name just a few.

Comparability: FACTS is a unique proprietary model measuring the trustworthiness of America’s largest (2000+) public companies. Other measurements of trust tend to be silo specific and qualitative, while FACTS® is quantitative and objective.

For more information: Barbara Brooks Kimmel, CEO & Cofounder

Barbara@trustacrossamerica.com

Copyright © 2018, Next Decade, Inc.

Trust Across America-Trust Around the World (TAA-TAW) recently released its 10th anniversary report “Trust & Integrity in Corporate America 2018.” The report includes a list of America’s public companies that were named to TAA-TAW’s proprietary Trust & Integrity Index, requiring a score of at least 70/100 in our unique FACTS(R) Framework, now with 8 years of data. Understanding that no company is perfect, only 103 companies in the Russell 1000 qualified including several from Finance, proving once again that industry is not destiny.

A few names from the sector in alphabetical order: Bank of America, Blackrock, Capital One Financial, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Voya Financial. Congratulations to the leadership of these companies on their success.

To access the complete report please visit the home page at www.trustacrossamerica.com 

Barbara Brooks Kimmel is an award-winning communications executive and the CEO and Cofounder of Trust Across America-Trust Around the World whose mission is to help organizations build trust. A former consultant to McKinsey and many Fortune 500 CEOs and their firms, Barbara also runs the world’s largest global Trust Alliance, and is the editor of the award-winning TRUST INC. book series and TRUST! Magazine. In 2012 she was named one of “25 Women who are Changing the World” by Good Business International, and in 2017 she became a Fellow of the Governance & Accountability Institute. Barbara holds a BA in International Affairs and an MBA. Don’t forget to TAP into Trust!

For more information contact barbara@trustacrossamerica.com