Why Building Trust Should Be Every CEO’s Top Priority, With Zain Raj

Filed in Podcasts, Previous Episodes on September 19, 2023

In their search for continued success, many businesses lose touch with the foundational elements that fueled their success, becoming complacent and expecting the good times to go on forever.

Then they begin to struggle.

Not just because of operational weaknesses, management disruptions, or changing business environments, but rather because they forget that their success depends on one crucial foundation: people.

Human beings who are their customers, their suppliers, and their employees. It is those people who make or break a business and brand. To win with them, businesses need to earn and retain their trust.

By leveraging a framework grounded on proven social sciences principles, ancient wisdom, and modern-day management principles, any company, whether surviving or thriving, can ignite business growth.

Trust is the most underleveraged impact-maker in the business world today.

The power of trust can help any company ignite growth in a way never imagined before:

Forget AI, sustainability, or any other ideas: amplifying trust will have a transformative impact on any business.
Don’t think you’re a manufacturing, services, transportation, etc. business. You’re actually in the people business.
There is a framework to building trust grounded on proven principles in the social sciences, ancient wisdom, and modern-day management principles.

A visionary leader, business accelerator and industry futurist, Zain Raj combines innovation and creativity to create new business models for the future in his new book, THE PYRAMID PUZZLE: Igniting Transformation with the Power of Trust.

Tune in to hear Zain’s answers to questions such as:

  •  In your new novel, The Pyramid Puzzle, you say the average business consultant often focuses on the wrong things when they are called in to help a struggling brand or business. What do you think most consultants get wrong?
  • You identify trust as key to business success. Can you define trust in the context of business?
  • A business’ three constituents are customers, employees, and suppliers. Where are trust pressure points for each of these groups?
  • In The Pyramid Puzzle, your three protagonists put their heads together to save a legacy brand that is on the skids. Your main protagonist, Joseph Chandler, is a business professor; his role in the process is somewhat self-evident. But he works side-by-side with a young woman whose first interest is the social sciences, and her boyfriend, a philosophy major. Can you talk about how those latter two disciplines relate to business success?
  • What does the pursuit of trust look like in practical terms? Where should a struggling brand start in order to turn things around, and what are the most cost-effective ways to use their presumably limited financial resources?
  • And much, much more!

 

About This Guest: ()

A visionary leader, business accelerator and industry futurist, Zain Raj combines innovation and creativity to create new business models for the future. In his new book, THE PYRAMID PUZZLE: Igniting Transformation with the Power of Trust, he tells a story about how using a framework grounded on proven social sciences principles, ancient wisdom, and modern-day management principles can ignite business growth. Chairman and CEO of Shapiro+Raj, an independent research and insights company. Zain is also the founder and CEO of zednext, an ideas incubator that takes an objective and disruptive look at issues and trends to help marketers and business leaders realize their full potential in a data-driven, digitally led and insights-driven world. Raj is also author of Marketing for Tomorrow, Not Yesterday and Brand Rituals: How Successful Brands Bond with Customers for Life.