Spot on. Well said, but if I may, I’d like to underscore a few of your points.

First, we have created an online self-assessment product based on the Trust Equation, called the TQ (Trust Quotient). About 70,000 people have now taken it.

And – to underscore your point – it turns out that the two most powerful components are Intimacy and Self-Orientation. I don’t say that casually: that is based on a multiple regression analysis, and on the average TQ scores for a series of six typologies based on the four trust components.

I would argue it’s probably always been this way, but I take your point about the commoditization of credibility, and the democratization of reliability – what’s a poor strategist to do?

And I think you’re completely right about the dilemma this puts in front of higher education. The field of sales is a case in point. A rapidly increasing number of undergraduate schools in the US are beginning to teach personal selling – including basics of influence, trust and persuasion.

But at the graduate level, we are still under the sway of the Tyranny of Content – harking not just back to Porter’s Five Forces and BCG’s Barnyard, but to the whole behavioralist undertaking that has for decades given social scientists a case of physics envy in western academia. At least, since Drucker.

Thus when Harvard Business School et al set out to study “sales,” they can’t resist the temptation to turn it into a data-based analysis of processes and systems; and the types of selling most attractive to MBA types turn out to be the Challenger sale – an unjustified claim that leading with straight content to the chin somehow trumps relationships.

It doesn’t of course; what’s true, and becoming truer as you note, is the idea that people are only influenced by those whom they let into their circle of influence: people they trust, or like, or are willing to let their guard down with.

“The idea of business management as a liberal art” is very much an idea whose time has come. Thank you for articulating the case in some new and interesting ways.