Extreme Sports.

We all know them, sports taken to the limit of human endurance, usually requiring some kind of rubber band apparatus with a full medical team on the side line. They can usually be seen as the last news item as we marvel at the survival rate of the participants or on a niche cable channel where life and death are a ratings boost. Everything taken to extremes, captures the imagination of the viewer and transfixes us to the end because it's hard to believe anyone would put themselves into such situations.

Business is never as extreme, unless you are in the gun trade or need to navigate the Boxing Day sales for that forgotten Christmas present. Yet maybe there could be extreme limits for business, especially in the credibility and acknowledgement of customer dealings. Imagine if your clients believed everything you said, everything you wrote and everything you provided as a service or product? No struggle to reach targets, no effort in making profit and no travail in keeping clients.

Okay the above seems like some kind of deity, some God like personage without faults or maybe a business with no agenda but to satisfy their clients no matter what. To have never been let down by a business leads to extreme trust and companies are slowly coming to the realization this level of credibility can be the nirvana of success. Individually, positions of extreme trust used to be the domain of church, medicine and airline pilots but businesses are working towards a transparent relationship with their clients that could see some achieve it as they strive for "honesty as a competitive advantage".

Don Peppers in his forthcoming book of the same name, works the angle that Tony Hsieh has so successfully managed at Zappos, where culture is the competitive advantage. Peppers sees honesty as the strongest business strategy and it's hard to criticise a concept hard wired into human nature. Yet he still calls it extreme, making me think the concept is hard to grasp for a lot of people. Watching out for your clients interests, even when they aren't, puts you into what Peppers calls "proactively trustable".

"Extreme trust like this engages people’s natural impulse to show empathy, transcending the commercial domain of monetary incentives and tapping into the social domain of friendship, sharing, and reciprocity", according to Peppers. Face to face trust is something we are all used to encountering and bricks and mortar businesses have a huge advantage over the online world where connections are not so easily made. Body language and facial nuances missing in online transactions, require web businesses to be so transparent that trust is built via consistently exceeding service and credibility levels.

I have a lot of music on my iPod and I don't always remember every song bought, so when I buy a song through iTunes, I'm comforted by the fact the system remembers and won't let me re buy a previously purchased song. Just one example of how online players need to work to transparency and openness to engender extreme trust. The future for online, is transparently obvious, I'll only trust you if you show me you really do care, are completely open and want me as a lifetime customer. If you do that, then you have my extreme trust. No bungy cord required.