Imitate Jesus and Socrates

Stephen M.R. Covey with Revecca R. Merrill. The Speed of Trust. New York: Free Press, 2006.

In 1791 Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography was published, and so began the American tradition of self-help books. In his book, Franklin linked moral behavior with material success. Morality pays off. Covey follows in the Franklin tradition.

The body of the book proper is preceded by eleven pages of testimonials from CEO’s, business executives, media figures, and self-help gurus. The very people I trust the least. Most egregious is the inclusion of Dr. Laura Schlessinger, former radio talk show host who lost her job after an on air racist rant in which she repeated the “N word” multiple times while accusing a Black caller of being too sensitive about racial prejudice and claiming that all of the Blacks who voted for Barak Obama had done so because they were racists. Her diatribe is on Youtube and makes for interesting, appalling, listening. You are known by the company you keep.

This is a book that pushes a conservative, corporatist bias. Bad behaviours are described as “taxes”. Government regulation is portrayed (14-15) as evidence of mistrust, and not the prudent management it usually is. Specifically, Covey cites the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which came about after massive fraud by Enron and WorldCom, as an enormous burden on companies. No thought is given to the pensioners who lost their life savings due to the rampant fraud that necessitated the Act.

Covey loves charts, graphs, and numbered lists. The Speed of Trust reduces moral behavior to a planned activity that can be summarized by a few visuals, desirable because it adds to the bottom line. Strangely, he places the onus for moral improvement on individual behavior and not on large scale corporate wrongs. “Can you see why employees don’t trust their managers?” he asks. And then misdirects our attention: “Most of the time, it’s not the huge, visible withdrawals like Enron and WorldCom ethics violations that wipe out organizational trust. It’s the little things … that gradually weaken and corrode credibililty” (47). No, Mr. Covey, it is corporate misbehavior that weakens trust. It is the vast greed of the CEO’s and investment bankers who ran the world’s economy into the ground and caused millions of honest workers to lose their jobs. That is the problem, not the man or woman who emails a friend from work or takes five extra minutes of coffee break.

Nobody is against trust or decent behaviour. They are valuable qualities in and of themselves, and they do not need to be justified by bottom line concerns, and they definitely do not need to be used to deflect attention from the corporatists responsible for our current economic woes.