Trust-it is a most important concept, but yet ephemeral. It’s hard to say what builds it in the first place, but it is perhaps easier to say what will destroy it-doubt.
A recent survey entitled the "Edelman Trust Barometer", has shown that people in general have very little trust of business or government leaders. In fact, it said that of those surveyed in Ireland, less than one in 10 believes a business or government leader will actually tell the truth when confronted with a difficult issue.
That is pretty low when you think about it, but not entirely unexpected given the recent unpleasantness over the whole world economic meltdown and all.
The survey report goes on to say that the primary reasons for the general population’s lack of trust in business were found to be a combination of perceptions of corruption or fraud and the wrong incentives driving business decisions.
Now, that adds up to rather a lot of implications for how business is done. We all know that in the end, profit is the primary motivation for most companies. In a crisis, saving face can also be a strong motivator, as can ensuring that one is blamed for nothing-I refrain from using the word innocent here, because in real terms, the word is neither applicable nor appropriate to corporations. Under those motivators then, many crimes have been committed by corporations and those who lead them, but it is not always necessary for exposure of such things to erode the reputation of a company.
Over the last number of years, doubts have been expressed about the reliability of Chinese IT infrastructure equipment, such as network switchgear and servers. It had been feared that such equipment from China had backdoors that would allow either monitoring or control of the equipment, possibly by the Chinese military or government, if such a distinction is necessary.
In fact, it was even feared that military equipment that used processors and chipsets manufactured in China may contain such backdoors that would allow access to anything from fighter jets to ballistic missiles. However, even now, the original researcher has said that the backdoor he discovered may not attributable to the Chinese.
There has even been a recommendation from a committee in the US House of Representatives that said Chinese companies such as Huawei and ZTE should be banned from bidding for US government or military contracts due to such concerns.
Just lately, India has followed suit and gone a good way further as it has banned all foreign vendors from providing technology for its national broadband roll out.
Now, what does all of this paranoia add up to? Doubt. Irrespective of the truth of these accusations, it introduces uncertainty and doubt which serves to undermine the position of the respective companies, irrespective of the truth of the matter.
Indeed, the Cambridge researcher who found the back door in the Chinese-manufactured chips that powers much of the US military has now said that the back door was attributable to the US parent company, not the Chinese manufacturer who merely implemented the requested feature. But again, this has cast doubt on the whole process.
So we find ourselves unable to trust business and government leaders, and yet, we must take a calculated risk to trust someone because we need to work with governments, corporations, technology vendors and manufacturers. But what can we do to protect ourselves?
Well, I would argue that what we should do is demand honesty.
If a supplier, vendor or manufacturer has a case to answer, then we, as the consumers, whether that be individually, as companies or as nations, should demand honesty with evidence-not assurances, not statements of confidence, but evidence.
Now, this is where the lawyers will no doubt try to rein things in, but imagine if a company just came out and said, ‘yes we had a back door for this specific reason which seemed reasonable at the time and was implemented in this fashion’, without giving the game away completely to allow an script kiddie in the world to exploit it.
But it seems that such a thing may still be a pipe dream. One need only look at the recent disclosure of backdoor access to Barracuda equipment to see that it is not just Chinese companies that are suspected of carrying out such practices.
Doubt can be a creeping cancer that can destroy a company. The way to dispel doubt is to provide evidence. Many corporations have needed a little, shall we say, encouragement to provide such evidence, but if we as individual consumers, businesses and nations demand such evidence, there may be a slow but necessary change in culture that will mean that national bans on foreign vendors or products will be unnecessary.
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