2010: The Summer of Trust

Love was the buzzword in 1967, but that year's legacy was just the opposite. Trust is this summer's "love." What will the legacy be this time?

By Charles H. Green

What would become known as the Summer of Love was already taking shape in January 1967, in the Human Be-in at Golden Gate Park.The phrase itself—Summer of Love—was bandied about for months that spring by national media, building up demand among students impatiently waiting for the school year to end. The Grateful Dead, the Merry Pranksters, Free Love, Be-ins, Hippies, and Timothy Leary were all part of the mix. At the time, "Love" was a euphemism for various things: music, progressive political policies, psychedelic drugs, sex.

But however the word was used, it eventually became clear that the legacy of that summer was anything but love. As PBS later put it, "by 1968 … an alternative lifestyle had descended into a maelstrom of drug abuse, broken dreams, and occasional violence." The summer of 1967 was also the Summer of Riots in Newark, Detroit, and 126 other U.S. cities.

You could argue that the level of talk about "love" was inversely proportional to the love that resulted. Which brings us to 2010, and the Summer of Trust.

Distrust, Anger, and Discontent

In 2010, "trust" has bloomed in the public's consciousness the way "love" did back then. I've been focusing on trust for 13 years now, and the amount of attention I see focused on the subject is unprecedented.

But—what will be the legacy of the Summer of Trust? Will we look back on all this focus as a time of consciousness-raising, enabling an increase in a crucial element of business and society? Or, like the Summer of Love, will more talk actually signal the reverse—the beginning of even more malfeasance and declining trust?

Trust has certainly gotten the full attention of the measuring and tracking industries. Beginning in January, the Edelman Trust Barometer celebrated its 10th edition at Davos.Gallup hit the headlines with its Confidence in Institutions poll. Both showed new lows for various forms of trust.The Pew Research Center weighed in, showing trust in government down, with distrust, anger, and discontent all on the rise.

Perhaps most obviously, the "T" word got considerable play with current events. Think how quickly we came to connect "trust" (as in "abuse of" or "failure of") with: BP (BP) (April); Goldman Sachs (GS) (April); Toyota (TM) (February); GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) (July) congressional ethics (August); the press and the White House (July); Tylenol manufacturing (JNJ) (May).

Business Exchange

Track and share business topics across the Web.