TrustTalk - It's all about Trust

In this interview with Moira Dean, Professor in consumer psychology and food security at Queens University in Belfast, Northern Ireland (UK) we talk about her research into consumer food choices, food safety, food fraud, risk perceptions, and food supply chain management and food labeling. Consumers developed different food habits during the pandemic and lockdowns. We talk about the “head, heart,...

This interview with Richard Ned Lebow, Professor of International Political Theory at the Department of War Studies at King’s College in London, was taken, just before Russia invaded Ukraine. We talked about trust in international relations, about the view that asking Ukraine to renounce membership of NATO is dangerous (which he does not agree with), a discussion that rendered moot with the news a...

When companies or politicians break trust, it takes three equally important steps to repair trust. Sandra Sucher, a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School and co-writer of the book “ The Power of Trust: How Companies Build It, Lose It, Regain It”, takes us through some examples of apologies after broken trust that were ineffective, causing tremendous harm. UBER is a very compe...

Today’s guest is entrepreneur Leen Zevenbergen. Together with Marcello Palazzi, he started the non-profit organization “B Lab”, with the idea that a different kind of economy was not only possible but necessary and that business could lead the way towards a new, stakeholder-driven model. B Lab has become known for certifying B Corporations (or “Benefit Corporations”). A “B Corp” is a company that...

In this interview with Carl Hart, professor of neuroscience at Columbia University, New York, he sets out his belief that the way we think about drugs and addiction is wrong and prevents society to live up to its ideals of liberty and the pursuit of happiness. All drugs, he argues, should be fully legalized, and instead of punishing or shaming people for drug use, we should focus on helping them u...

Jacoba Sieders is among the top experts on digital identity in Europe. In this second interview with her (the first one was published on April 18, episode 17) she talks about the three phases of how digital identity developed over time, about “federated identity”, one password to log in to different organizations. In a third stage, you upload your data and by doing so establish your own digital id...

Roy Lewicki, the Irving Abramowitz Memorial Professor Emeritus at the Ohio State University, Columbus, OH. He is a leading scholar in the study of trust development and trust repair, negotiation, and conflict management processes. Trust repair is a critical part of negotiations, but also in marital therapy, community mediation, or business relationships. Apologies are important for repairing trust...

Can we trust the world to be able to feed 10 billion mouths in 2050? In this interview with Robert van Gorcom, director of Wageningen Food Safety Research he talks about the means to feed the world in 30 years in a sustainable way, respecting our planet. Science has to deliver the innovations necessary for the food production. There are 3 factors that create trust in food: sustainability, safety,...

Paul Zak is a professor at Claremont Graduate University in Southern California and the Founder of Immersion Neuroscience. He talks about the neuroscience of trust. His experiments researching the neurochemical oxytocin (the "Trust Molecule") show that most humans are biologically wired to cooperate, but that business and economics ignore the biological foundations of human reciprocity, risking lo...

Maikel Batelaan, consultant and co-author of the book “Why Should I Trust You” talks about the ideal of every organization: smooth collaboration. In practice, it is more unruly. After all, there are always complex problems that need to be solved. Many leaders then react impulsively: they flee or they fight. Increasingly, we see leaders who choose the solution that lies exactly in between: they cre...

Admiral Rob Bauer is NATO’s most senior military officer. In his first podcast interview he talks about the crucial role of trust in the military training and operations, about his years at the Naval Academy and the international retreat from Afghanistan, about “mission command” and his personal mantra “Expect the Unexpected”. He speaks of military personnel as highly educated and trained professi...

Paul Timmers talks about trust and cybersecurity. Cyber threats undermine trust in the daily practice of working with digital systems and in geopolitical relations. But even if we should increase our control of digital technologies, some myths about digital sovereignty must be debunked. Nevertheless, there are also sensible ways forward to strengthen strategic autonomy in the digital world. Import...

Afghanistan has been all over the news in the past weeks. The reason was far from positive. The Taliban unexpectedly returned to power, just at the time that the last international troops were being withdrawn from the country. The final chapter of twenty years of international engagement became the most tragic one, as countries tried to evacuate their citizens and the Afghans that had worked for t...

In this interview with trust researcher Bart de Jong he focuses on the impact of trust on teams in organizational settings, about the difference in hierarchy or rank among team members. Trust building in a team should not be a one-off exercise but an inherent element of every interaction, every day. He talks about three ways managers can have control over that they can use to build and maintain tr...

Deep trust and high expectations are set to be two pillars of high-performing cultures and Emotional Intelligence (EQ) is essential to both. It is said that when leaders set high expectations without the EQ necessary to create trust, they breed anxiety. They breed stress and burnout. Bert Iedema, board room coach has extensive experience with EQ and how to improve it by training, helping to create...

According to Marcos Aguiar, senior partner and managing director at BCG Sao Paulo, Brazil, 7 out of the 10 most valuable companies in the world, are ecosystems. When there is no trust or if the level of trust falls in an ecosystem, participants are less likely to cooperate and frictions occur, harming their performance. Competence is by far the most prevalent trust driver in the ecosystems he stud...

Trust becomes an issue in copyright in the digital age because it is based on an implicit understanding of the way content is copied and distributed versus how copyright could be infringed. In the pre-digital age, it is based on a foundation of trust between businesses and the amount of trust that was implied in relationships between creators and consumers. In the digital age, every user has the a...

David Horsager is a global expert on trust and CEO of Trust Edge Leadership Institute where the mission is to develop trusted leaders and organizations. Trust is a fundamental, bottom-line issue. Without it, leaders lose teams, salespeople lose sales, and organizations lose reputation, retention, and revenue. But high-trust teams and organizations bring out the best in their people and get the gre...

In this interview negotiation experts, Bob Bordone and Tim Masselink explain what it takes to build trust during negotiations. Negotiation includes any intent, any effort, any set of communications to influence or to persuade. So embedded under negotiation are things like dispute resolution or conflict resolution or mediation in my mind, because all of those tasks in some way are around trying to...

Interview with Jeroen Ouwehand. He is Global Senior Partner of the international law firm Clifford Chance. In this role, he not only represents 580 partners but also chairs the Partnership Council but he is above all the ambassador for the firm externally. The work of lawyers is all about trust, reputation, and quality. Once competing for instructions, during the pandemic there has been a flight t...

Our today’s guest is Ad Antonisse, Director Market Access and External Affairs of AstraZeneca in The Netherlands. He talks about AstraZeneca as a producer of personalized medicine for cancer treatments and the company’s public-private relationship with the inventor of the Covid-19 vaccine, Oxford University in the UK. Despite being in the middle of a pandemic, he doesn’t consider being in the cros...

Interview with Guido Möllering, director and Chair of Management at the Reinhard Mohn Institute at the Witten-Herdecke University in Witten, Germany, and editor-in-chief of the “Journal of Trust Research”. Is trust a useful subject for research as it is so elusive and hard to define? We talk about his 2006 book “Trust, Reason, Routine, Reflexivity". Inspired by the German sociologist Georg Simmel...

In this interview, Jaya Klara Brekke talks about the politics of blockchain technology and whether it solves the problem of power, how a technology that was meant to be “neutral” tends to ignore the fact that engineers and developers making real decisions on how the system should be designed, thereby quickly becoming politically contentious. She frames the term “Hippocratic Oath” making people mor...

Interview with Judit Neurink, an independent journalist who lived and worked in the Middle East. Trust is of great importance in her field of work. When training young journalists in Iraq she warned them that if they lie to their public, people will lose their trust. But many had no choice, as they worked for party media only interested in the truth of the party. Talking to Yezidi victims who esca...

Interview with Jacoba Sieders, Independent digital identity thought leader. In her view, controls and architectures to protect our important information need to be adjusted to a new reality of “zero trust”: data is distributed and in transit everywhere, across safe and unsafe devices and hyperconnected ecosystems. Identity- and access management is the guardian angel at the front door of systems a...