Be Trustworthy: The Rest Follows
Paperback
Series: Trust, Book 15
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Sep 28 2026
Pages: 292
Weight: 0.87
Height: 0.61 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
A Sunday breakfast in a small river town in Iowa. A woman at the next table turns to her children and introduces them to the man who fired their father.
That man is the author of this book.
Be Trustworthy is the story of fifty years in the rooms where trust is made and broken, told by someone who has sat in every one of them: a family kitchen in New Jersey in 1976, where a father told ten people the truth about the money; an audit staff that sent a young man to Hong Kong and São Paulo to find out whether a number was real; the day his own job ended in a single week; the week in March 2000 when a stock offering he had spent months on disappeared with the market; the chief financial officer's chair at Novartis Pharma AG in Basel; forty boardrooms; the morning in March 2023 when a bank failed before lunch; and the table in Greenwich where he finally learned what all of the work had been for.
Each chapter is one room, in the order the lessons arrived. Each one ends with a simple drawing, boxes and lines on one page, three lines on what built the thing, what broke it, and whether it can be repaired, and three things to take away.
The idea under every chapter is the same. Do not ask people to trust you. Be trustworthy. Saying trust me is a claim, and claims are cheap. Being trustworthy is conduct, and conduct can be checked.
George Bickerstaff has served in six chief financial officer's chairs, on more than forty corporate and nonprofit boards, and as chair of an international vaccine institute. He wrote the thirteen books of the Trust Series one room at a time. This is the thirteen in one, for the reader who will read one book, written in plain English so that anyone whom other people depend on, a chair, a manager, a parent, can follow it and use it.
Inside:
- Twenty-three chapters, each a true scene with a date and a place
- Twenty-three drawings, one per chapter
- Thirteen tools you can run this week, each one filled in once from the book: the proof chain, the truth clock, the crisis board, the first read, the naming sentence, the date, the three-ring map, the audition, and more
- A thirteen-week practice, one tool a week
- A guide to which of the thirteen books to read next for the room you are in
Nobody asks what a table achieved. They ask what it held.
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