Business relationships are often complex, confusing, and ever shifting. But if you strip away all of the traditions, formalities, and fluff you find they’re actually built upon a few very solid, very human, elements. Trust is one of them.

When people in one business decide to work with people in another business they are implicitly saying that they trust them. They trust that these people and this company can provide what they need. If they didn’t trust them, they would not work with them.

But what about contracts? Don’t detailed contracts specifying exact deliverables undermine trust?
No not really. Contracts are worst case scenario tools. They come into play when people prove to be untrustworthy. Contracts make trusting other people and companies easier at the start because they mitigate the damages of having relationships with untrustworthy partners.

So people trust each other...why is this good?
I like to think it’s good because it shows that business relationships are not necessarily built upon greed and selfishness. Trust itself is a good thing. It shows understanding, wisdom, and confidence in humankind.

Real World Example:
This example is a general one from here at silverorange. We work with a number of mail order companies. We build and maintain their e-commerce websites and they build and maintain their respective products and catalogs. Relatively we know very little about brass hardware, seeds, crystal, or pewter. In the same way our clients know very little about HTML, XML, RSS, PHP, SQL, etc. In our relationships with these clients we trust that they know about their products, their markets, and their customers. They trust that we know about web-servers, web-users, and design. If this mutual respect and trust was not present we would not be doing business together.