The theme of this edition is hard to grasp. Fill in the word ‘trust’ in a search engine and different definitions keep popping up. Lots of academics have tried to come up with businesslike definitions, but it turns out to be very hard. Trust is a very personal and vulnerable concept, which takes a very important place in peoples’ lives. As of a very young age, trust is very important in everybody’s personal life. Later on, it starts to hit your professional life as well. Can you trust your colleagues or your suppliers? Once trust is broken, it is very hard to repair it. When everything is going as it supposed to go, there is no problem, but people will always fall back on previous trust issues, once something goes wrong. I therefore think the following quote from Friedrich Nietzsche is very striking: “I am not upset that you lied to me, I am upset that from now on I cannot believe you”.
Next to issues which are the result of trust violence, there is the problem of gaining trust in the first place. There is always a certain degree of insecurity involved. Who is supposed to take the first step is the key difficulty. In any transaction the question arises, whether the delivery or the payment should take place first. It is in the nature of people to want to have a guarantee, which is often not possible. A large part of success is determined by a trustworthy treatment and you need to be able to rely on the people you do business with for the full hundred percent; especially when large investments and therefore large stakes are involved. This is the case at Partner Logistics, a company in automated warehousing. Blogger, Business Development Manager at this company, explains the trust issues, which occur when Partner Logistics is about to build a new warehouse for a client. This interesting article can be found on page 7.
If there is one sector, which had an enormous trust blow over the last years, it is the financial sector. The indisputable trust in banks is gone and they will have to try very hard to regain it. The feeling of distrust is nourished by the financial crisis and the fact that the loan requirements rise substantially. Besides, the politics are restraining the freedom of the complete industry. A debate is going on about ways to restore trust in this industry. Several experts will discuss this current topic in our Opinion Corner starting on page 18.
We welcome a brand new article to the FIRST Quarterly this time. ‘CareerPath’ informs you about career possibilities when studying business. The cliché that you can end up in very different sectors after finishing you Master degree certainly got confirmed. How a business student ended up becoming a pilot can be read on page 30.
Then there is one person I would really like to thank. The coordinator of amongst others the FIRST Quarterly committee, finished his board year and will start studying again as of February. We, as a committee, will miss his enormous perseverance, his PR-talent and of course all the hours he put into the layout of this magazine.
I hope you all enjoy reading this edition!
Editor-in-Chief