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Trust Across Borders: How Trust Is Built, Broken, and Carried Across Borders
Paperback
Series: Trust, Book 14
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Sep 22 2026
Pages: 138
Weight: 0.43
Height: 0.30 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Trust is built the same way everywhere. It is broken differently in every place.
George W. Bickerstaff, III has lived in five countries on four continents, moved seventeen times, been chief financial officer six times, and sat on more than forty boards. In every country the rules of trust were different, and nobody handed him the rulebook when he landed.
This book is one life told as a set of rooms. A kitchen table in Pittsburgh where eight children learned trust without knowing it was a lesson. A payroll paid by thumbprint under a half-built library in São Paulo, where a young woman with an English accent translated, and later became his wife. A car turned around on a turntable in Brussels. A first day in Basel, thirty minutes late in the country that trusts the clock. Forty flags outside an institute in Seoul. A doctor in Kigali who called him by a title he does not hold. Two doors at the Vatican, and the difference between them. A phone call on a bridge in Florence that cost more than any deal.
From those rooms come eight rules that travel: say what you will do, then do it; learn the local clock, then honor it; tell the truth early, once, to everyone at the same time; show up in person, and come back; stand where the number was made before you trust it; pay the debt to the person who vouched for you; eat with people; keep your word to the people who cannot check it.
And from the same rooms comes a map of how trust breaks: thirteen places on one grid, by whether trust there begins with the task or the relationship, and by what a breach of trust costs. Every chapter closes with one simple drawing, three things to take away, and three things to do.
For the reader there is a full set of tools: the eight rules on one page, the grid to place your own rooms, a first-year calendar for anyone arriving somewhere new, nine questions for reading any room, ten questions before you cross a border, and the Trust Across Borders Test.
Written for leaders, directors, expatriates, and anyone whose word has to hold in a place that is not their own. Plain language, first person, scenes first. The lesson, after all those countries, companies, and years, is simpler than the book: keep your word.
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