Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

by Thomas L. Friedman

“Collaboration moves at the speed of trust,” argued Chris Thompson, who works with cities for the Fund for Our Economic Future, in an essay on its website. When people trust each other, they take ownership of problems and practice stewardship. The political scientist Francis Fukuyama, who wrote a classic book in 1996 on why the most successful states and societies exhibit high levels of trust—Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity—noted that “social capital is a capability that arises from the prevalence of trust in a society or in certain parts of it. It can be embodied in the smallest and most basic social group, the family, as well as the largest of all groups, the nation, and in all the other groups in between.” Where trust is prevalent, he explained, groups and societies can move and adapt quickly through many informal contracts. “By contrast, people who do not trust one another will end up cooperating only under a system of formal rules and regulations, which have to be negotiated, agreed to, litigated, and enforced, sometimes by coercive means,” wrote Fukuyama.