Michael UngarCEO of the Industry 4.0 Club

Building Trust: The Key to Business Growth and Innovation

27 Feb 2025 · 2 min

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1:43

In this monologue, the speaker reflects on the economic disruptions that have challenged manufacturers over recent decades, emphasizing the particular resilience required of small, local, and regional producers. He argues that trust should be treated as a tangible business resource: higher levels of trust—both within a firm and in the broader economic environment—enable firms to take calculated risks, experiment with new strategies, and ultimately achieve breakthrough value creation. The speaker highlights three dimensions of trust: (1) internal trust between staff and managers, which allows employees to surface problems and challenge assumptions; (2) external trust that encourages reaching out to outside experts for fresh perspectives; and (3) the strategic role of trust in competing internationally, especially against large economies like China. He cautions that while preserving existing assets is essential, refusing to invest trust‑driven risk‑taking limits the size of the market "pie" and hampers growth. The overall message is a call for manufacturers to consciously cultivate trust as a lever for innovation and competitive advantage.

Chapters

We've had a lot of disruption economically over the last decades. And so the folks who are still surviving as manufacturers, especially as small, local, regional manufacturers, they've got some grit, right? And so, you know, there's this fear that if we do something too much, like we don't know what's out there, we don't know what we're going to bang into, better to stay where we are. But the converse of that is that when we want to actually create real value, we have to think about how big it could be, right? So I don't want to lose what I have now, but if I don't contribute to something else, then the size of the pie doesn't get any better or it doesn't get any bigger. And that's a really big consideration as we think about international competitiveness, as we think about what we're doing versus China and things like that. So I think the first thought on trust is We, we need to think about it as an actual resource in business, right? If we have more trust in our economy or in our business, we're going to be able to take more risks, which may not always turn out, but when they do, that's where you get the home run. And we need to think about the trust between our own staff, right? So, you know, trust is the ingredient of reporting to your manager that there's a problem with what he thinks is going to happen. Right? It's— and maybe it's not going to go that way. Trust is what helps you to reach out to a new expert to find, like, maybe some new way of looking at the strategies that you have and so on. So really, you know, it comes down to how much are we willing to open up and risk in order to create something of value.