Ricky’s Online Business Blog

The problem is, who to trust and what to entrust them with? This comes with experience. My observation in business is that, we should be shrewd as snakes (know the workings of the devil), but be innocent as doves (be like angel believing the world can get better)

No doubt we are living in a distrustful world. There are some people who just can’t be trusted. But I guess most people are innocent like you and me, basically good people but just hesitate to trust others.

I suppose the world maintains itself based on trust, without which it will just break down. We trust our engineers have done good job that our roof won’t fall down to hit our head. We trust our banker with our money that it won’t get lost.

Managing people needs trust. We must trust our employees for certain things, or we will end up doing all the job ourselves.  Expanding business network needs trust. We must trust our partners that they will do their part, or we will end up being lone ranger in business.

There is a Chinese saying that if we use the service of people, trust them. Otherwise, do not hire him (用人不疑，疑人不用). Especially true in managing people who work for us.

Correct me if I’m wrong, the world needs more trust.  As we extend our trust to people more, good and innocent people like you and me will reciprocate their trust to us.

Between trusting people and distrusting people, I would rather choose to trust than distrust. The world needs more trust and we can do our part to make it a better world. Not only for the world, but for the advantage of ours and people around us too.

The problem is, who to trust and what to entrust them with? This comes with experience. My observation in business is that, we should be shrewd as snakes (know the workings of the devil), but be innocent as doves (be like angel believing the world can get better)

Are you checking up on your potential employees on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn?

Why not? Businesses, banks, legal firms and government agencies have been known to conduct background check on people using CTOS, CCRIS and other means.

After all, foreknowledge on people, companies and markets we are dealing with will be much useful to ensure higher success for us.

Sun Tzu even says, “Thus, what enables the wise sovereign and the good general to strike and conquer, and achieve things beyond the reach of ordinary men, is foreknowledge” (故明君賢將，所以動而勝人，成功出于眾者，先知也)

So, why can’t employers check on job candidates before hiring them? One justification is that, hiring the wrong employee is not only costly to the company, but also detrimental to the employee who comes into the wrong job.

But are you aware of the dangers of doing such online background check?  Feel free to comment on my presentation done in December 2009 below or on SlideShare.net.

I am privileged to have an existing customer happily hosting one of their web sites with me.  Recently the boss told his staff to transfer all their domain names and hosting under me.

However, the other hosting provider, actually their outsource web developer, would not budge.  He claimed the web sites make use of certain ASP.NET components not normally available on other servers.

Fair enough.  I asked for a list of ASP.NET components required.  Perhaps they really need to stay with him.  But after checking the list, those are just standard components supported on most if not all servers.

Finally, the web developer agreed to let customer go, but not without a “transfer fee” charged for the trouble to transfer their web sites and email accounts to the new server (which I would help do for customer free of charge if given all necessary server login details).

However, after some consideration, the customer decided not to pay the “transfer fee”, not because of money, but because of principle.  Maybe.  But I suspect another reason being the fact that their web sites are under the control of the developer.  They have to rely on the web developer to access and update their web sites.

After all, the web developer has been doing a good job maintaining their web sites.  From customer’s point of view, why switch to me if there is not much compelling reason to switch over to me?  But from my point of view, it is another typical case of customer web sites and hosting being hijacked by provider.