One should be careful in allowing or expressing feelings of gratitude when good fortune comes at someone else’s expense.  Within that recognition of humility, I came to a moment where it was appropriate to congratulate my step-son-in-law on an extraordinary career advancement that came his way.

He had the good fortune to be standing at the place of trust when investors, owners, and top management needed to turn to someone to trust.  It is very important to know that good fortune is not good luck.  Good fortune is born of the skills he brought to the job just a year ago.  What makes it worth noting is that he built on his starting point systematically with his recognition that improvements were needed and his patient yet determined approach to addressing those needs.  He was careful and that meant recognizing when he didn’t have the authority or the power to make the changes. 

When his superiors terminated his boss and turned to him of an afternoon, he experienced a significant career maker in the course of an hour.  He became GM of a half-billion dollar casino and responsible for the continued employment of 1500 who need their jobs.   It is an achievement that will now always be on his resume, but more importantly it is a responsibility that will grow and stay his as he uses his time to do the job that he believes needs to be done.  The organization now needs stability and they will look to him to provide it.  With each step, he will demonstrate that he has provided it and the trust will grow.  That is the undeniable fact about trust, it comes based on action and it grows based on action. 

It also flourishes best in a field of humility.   When you find a hard working young man who does his best to deliver on every promise he ever makes, you have to recognize it on the Telluride Promise website/blog.

Forget Acorn and the video tape urging an entrepreneurial prostitution ring. Even an angry partisan could agree there may have been some entrapment trapped in that set up. Now we have a New York restaurant, Maloney and Porcelli that has set up a web site to allow self-important and self-indulgent types who spend too much, like say three hundred bucks for lunch for them and one “client, ” to punch in the amount and take back three or four plebeian sized checks to salt their expense accounts. Oh, and if they can’t eat all of that $49 filet mignon, the doggie bag provided bears the logo of a much cheaper food establishment like Sbarro.

Now how many people in this equation disgust you? Perhaps you, like the president of the owner of Maloney & Porcelli find corporate penny pinching so disgusting that you believe “just trying to have a little fun with everything that’s going on” is absolution? Well, sorry, he certainly is the first one who disgusts me. The notion that you sell a proposition to someone to cheat his or her employer may not, like so much of what goes down in this high tone society, be illegal, but it is disgusting.

How about you’re the one who takes him up on it and buys the overpriced food and the wink that you and he are just a little bit better than hardworking people who don’t cheat. Well, you disgust me, too.

So, you ask why would I risk getting sued by naming the name of this establishment that clearly does and should not do a land office business in that noble bastion of good business practices, New York City? Well, because they sought out the New York Post to publicize their clever strategy and I am finding rather a few yawns at the tired (have you ever noticed that is a play on “tried”) notion of simply living up to your Promise. What if your boss gave you the trust to take someone out to lunch and to try to use that small gesture as an influence on developing new business? That’s swell. That means you earned some trust. If he thinks you spend too much after he sends you on this mission, then take it up with him. Face to face. If your client requires that kind of treatment, take it up in client development strategy meetings. If he doesn’t require such treatment and you try this end around, you endanger the relationship because my bet in life is that people who don’t cheat can smell people who do.

There’s the principle to follow: The restaurant stinks, don’t go there. The people who go there and cheat, stink. Don’t do business with them.

How can you know who to trust? I guarantee you: people who don’t cheat can smell people who do.