Trust in business is completely critical. In his book, Lovemarks, Kevin Roberts writes about trust and respect being the two precursors to a Lovemark. I agree - for someone to love your business, they must first trust and respect it.
 
It's interesting being in Bali, thinking about the cultural aspects of trust in business. In Australia the government basically trusts us to pay our tax. We may get audited, but its largely an honour system. And the vast majority of businesses do pay their taxes. On the other hand, retail stores don't trust the public (and often the staff) not to steal stuff. If you were leaving your shop for five minutes you'd lock the door.
 
Here it's the opposite.

This is a fabulous story of David beating Goliath ... and what can happen in the new world of social media if your customers don't love your business, and you patently don't care about how they feel.
 
In our little tale, David is aptly named Dave Carrol - a very likable country-singing guitar-playing Canadian. Our Goliath is United Airlines, a behemoth of a company worth in the vicinity of $1.8 billion US dollars.
 
Dave and his band of merry men, The Sons of Maxwell (that's the name of the band) were travelling to Nebraska on the afore mentioned airline when to their horror, they saw their guitars being thrown by the baggage handlers. And as it turns out, Dave's Taylor guitar was broken.

I had my most unusual business coaching session for the year last night, with Francis and Cecilia from the village of Veifa'a in Papua New Guinea.

My brother Jon and his wife Fiona lived in Veifa'a for a couple of years as part of a volunteers abroad program (there are now numerous babies and toddlers named Jon and Fiona in the village). They become good friends with Francis and Cecilia, and were adopted into their respective clans. And now they have brought them out to Australia for a holiday.

They plan to take back a laptop and an old printer / scanner / copier to start a letter writing and photocopying business in their village. Jon asked me to give them a pro bono business coaching session. And I have to say, doing business in a PNG village has its advantages!

Here is a story from my brother Ben:

The other day was running a training session in Sydney. This guy turned up late, and was basically a royal pain in the arse - think a high school student up the back who knows the teacher can't give him a detention. Continually interrupting, yawning loudly, wrapping his knuckles on the desk. After about 40 minutes I said to him that he's making it impossible to run the session and if he has any issues about the software that he needs to discuss we'll have a chat about it after the session. He really cracked it at that point, and said I was being paranoid etc.

Over the last week I have had some profound coaching sessions with my clients and it never ceases to amaze me the power of nurturing. In the old realm of business 'nurture' is rarely spoken of. It may be referred to loosely as a preferred employer, caring for the people in the business and looking after staff. But is that really the same as nurturing? Does nurturing have a place in business at all and how can it help my business to thrive?