Trust Enabling Strategies

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Our management innovation is

Trust Enablement®

It helps organization drive performance by optimizing the trust of key stakeholders and enhancing the value of business relationships.

Our vision is illustrated in a parable

A tale of Two CEOs.

Our research and analysis divisions are

TEResearch and TEAnalytics, offering the

Governance Lifecycle Model (GLM)™ Assessment Tool.

Our management consulting services are delivered by

It offers The Trust Optimizer Program™.

Trust Enablement® practices improve board effectiveness, accelerate revenue growth, increase business valuations, reduce transaction costs, and stimulate collaborative innovation.

Our methods help corporate boards govern more effectively, business strategists refine business critical success factors, and operating departments increase the volume, velocity and value of business transactions.

We offer the Governance Lifecycle Assessment Tool™ to analyze and benchmark the effectiveness of corporate governance styles, and the Trust Optimizer Program™ as a consulting service to help enhance the value of business transactions.

Our unique Trust Enablement® Framework provides a sound foundation for measuring trust indicators and optimizing conditions for stakeholder trust.

We are the developer and owner of a proprietary management innovation, called Trust Enablement®. It is used by organizations in technologies and business processes to help them achieve their business goals by optimizing the trust of their stakeholders. Trust Enabled™ business practices reduce transaction costs and enhance business value in areas as diverse as supply chain management and corporate governance.

Trust Enablement® is both a management philosophy and a technology for business best practices. It fills a business practices void by counterbalancing risk management based control mechanisms that preserve trust, with those that develop trust, and thereby provides a complementary, foundational, new management competency. It serves to fundamentally change the leadership mindset from an inside out to an outside-in orientation.

Trust Enablement® has broad applicability, similar to risk management, but its value to business is far greater. Whereas risk management is defensively minded and preservation oriented, Trust Enablement™ is offensive and growth oriented.

Trust Enablement® is a better approach for supporting the collaborative innovations required to compete in the 21st century.

Read "The Facts on Trust"

What's New with Us

Supply Chain & Logistics Association Canada, Trust Enabling Strategies, and Aberdeen Group are proud to bring you Aberdeen's first survey dedicated to Global Supply Chain Risk Management & Trust.

We were honoured to be invited by Dr. Susan Sproule of McMaster University's DeGroote School of Business to deliver a lecture to her eBusiness Strategy MBA class. Our presentation topic was "Enabling Online Trust" (download presentation and exercise).

The theme of this year's SCL Conference was "Creating a Resilient Supply Chain". Our presentation topic was "Trust Enabled™ Supply Networks: Enabling trust for collaboration, innovation and sustainability" (download presentation with speaker notes). Much of the material in the presention is based on our white paper ”Trust Enabled Supply Networks: Uncovering the trust-building secrets of highly collaborative supply chains”.

We posted our point of view about Microsoft's recent End to End Trust initiative on Microsoft's End to End Trust community form. Here is an excerpt:

"... End to End Trust needs to be founded on a comprehensive framework that addresses two overriding trust objectives: 1) Developing Trust; and 2) Protecting Trust. From what I have read so far, most of the discussion appears to focus on the latter."

Alex Todd is Industry Chair for the 9th World Congress on the Management of eBusiness (WCMeB 2008) being hosted jointly by the Carleton Research Centre for Technology Management (RCTM) and the McMaster eBusiness Research Centre (MeRC). The Congress will be held in Ottawa at the Sprott School of Business, Carleton University, October 5-8, 2008. This year's theme is "Collaboration 2.0 – Honing the Collaborative Minds of Leaders in the New Enterprise".

Our Presentation at the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit in Toronto: "Measuring Awareness, Brand and Competitive Standing - Using Trust Indicators".

Our presentation to the Ponemon Institute's RIM Council: "Trust Measures & Indicators".

We are honoured to have had the privilege to contribute to Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams' "Wikinomics Playbook".

In Brand-Monitoring Solutions We Trust by By Jeff Zabin, CRM Buyer

"Trust is a strange animal in the world of business. Its inputs and outputs are ambiguous. It can't be codified. Like other intangible assets, it appears nowhere on the balance sheet.

The degree to which one company declares its reliance on the integrity and character of another company remains purely judgment-based and therefore subject to the foibles of human error -- although some folks, including those at Trust Enablement Strategies, a firm that provides an analytic framework for assessing the level of trust that exists (or needs to exist) between two parties, may beg to differ."

Our position: Judgments are formed based on perceiving one or more trust indicators. Our Trust Enablement® analytical framework identifies and classifies trust indicators according to how they affect trust perceptions.

‘It’s a wise servant that knows his master,’ so how well do you
know your board? Take the question a step further — do you understand why it acts the way it does and the implications of that behaviour for the company’s future? The accompanying article, [Corporate Governance Best Practices: One size does not fit all] from the Canadian Division’s Corporate Governance Quarterly of Summer 2007 may help you answer the last question and in the process, provide you with greater insight into the reasons that your board acts the way it does. The author divides companies into four separate categories, mostly related to their stages of development, and their boards into four types, mostly to do with their principal governance style. Then it examines the implications from each of these divisions, both for the business itself and for its valuation. You will learn, for example, which style presides over the most profitable companies — fascinating and instructive!" - Frank Bush FCIS, Vice-President, ICSA International Council

Alex Todd's question to the Globe & Mail's Janet McFarland and her response about "Board Games 2007" are posted in the transcript of a live online chat:

Question: "...is the Globe planning to further evolve its Board Games scoring methodology to reflect differences in the appropriateness of various corporate governance styles for different kinds of companies pursuing distinct strategic performance priorities?"

Answer: "...I don't foresee us making dramatic changes to our methodology to take into account the wide variety of different corporate styles or strategies out there...."

Charles H. Green, trust expert, author of Trust-Based Selling, and co-author of The Trusted Advisor, recommends our we web site in his blog:

"Todd’s site is worth visiting if you want to delve into measurement and management issues, or if you simply want to stretch your mind about the issues of trust in business.

He also has the best collection of trust-related quotes I’ve seen."

Trust Enabling Strategies presented two papers to the Conference Board of Canada's Expert Roundtable on Trust Measures and Indicators. This was a continuation of the 2006 Deloitte-sponsored study on "Rebuilding Trust in Canadian Organizations". It looked at indicators of trust from employees, investors, customers and the general public.

Papers addressed the following questions:

What are the key indicators that directors and managers should look at to determine whether and to what extent a given group of stakeholders has trust in the company?
Why are these indicators the most important ones to assess?
How can companies track those indicators?

We contributed thought pieces for measuring customer and investor trust:

Our article "Creating Trust in Government" has been selected one of the 10 best blog posts on trust for the July issue of Trusted Advisor Associates' "Carnival of Trust" blog posting.

Our article "Corporate Governance Best Practices: One size does not fit all" has been published in the Summer 2007 issue of the Corporate Governance Quarterly, a publication of the International Corporate Secretaries Association (ICSA) and Canadian Society of Corporate Secretaries (CSCS). James Gould, Chair, Editorial Committee, introduced the article in his editorial with "Alex Todd reports on some research on the connection between corporate governance and the corporate lifecycle. It's always easy to think that there is one answer to every situation when in fact we have to adapt our governance approach to the company's circumstances. As an aside, it turns out that there is a link between good corporate governance and profitability. No surprise there."

We now offer Internet-based advisory services via Kasamba.

We are participating (as TrustEnabler) in a discussion to shape an online justice system for the world and reduce global poverty.

Don Tapscott's think-tank, New Paradigm, has contracted us to write a white paper on "Honing the Collaborative Mind: Enabling trust in the Enterprise 2.0". This research builds on his recent book “Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything”.

Get quick answers to your questions "What is Trust Enablement?", "What is the business value of trust?" and "Where can Trust Enablement™ add value?" in our FAQ.

We have posted a couple of articles in our Igloo blog. See "Improving Confidence in Corporate Canada" and "Creating trust in government is more than 'cleaning house'". We are also interested in the future prosperity of Canada and have been conducting research via our Second Canadians community in Second Life.

We launched the Trust Enablers Group blog on gather.com. It provides a place for participants to meet, exchange information and collaborate about how to increase the volume, velocity and value of transactions by creating conditions that allow relying parties to trust.

TE Research, the research division of Trust Enablement Incorporated, introduces the Governance Lifecycle Model™ (GLM) Assessment Tool. It measures how effectively a corporate "governance style" supports the company's strategic priorities. The tool is based on research discussed in Alex Todd's recent article "Corporate Governance Best Practices: One size does not fit all". The research identified the corporate governance practices associated with superior strategic performance, namely that corporations with "management-controlled" boards enjoy faster sales growth, corporations with "sovereign boards" exhibit superior profitability, corporations with "management-influenced boards" distribute more cash to shareholders, and corporations with "trusted boards" are rewarded with higher valuations. Visitors are invited to try the public beta-test version of the tool. Assessment results are sent by e-mail.

Alex Todd's published comments and question to the Globe & Mail about their series "Board Games 2006" regarding:

The story "New disclosure rules to reflect evolving world"
The story "Directors' share ownership plans"
Q&A on Live Board Games discussion with Globe & Mail's Janet McFarland

Alex Todd conducted a workshop "Building Trust in a Law Firm" (slides, article

and newsletter

) at the 2006 Toronto Law Office Management Association (TLOMA) Conference.

Alex Todd's article: "Corporate Governance Best Practices: One size does not fit all". The article was published in Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) Canadian newsletter Corporate Governance Review (CGR). It was also posted in the Members in Action section of the Canadian Association of Management Consultants (CAMC) web site.

Alex Todd presented his paper "Trust Enabled™ Corporate Governance" (view MS Word version) to the Doctoral Consortium at the 2006 McMaster World Congress on Corporate Governance. Click on doctoral or general for related presentations.

Alex Todd's recent article: A Political commentary on Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper's proposed Federal Accountability Act, entitled "Creating Trust in Government".

Alex Todd was recently interviewed by Michael Hepworth, President of The Results Exchange about ”Trust The Most Important Marketing Ingredient”.