The Power of Trust

Trust, at every level of business and society, has never mattered so much and at the same time. CEOs, managers, presidents, governors - leaders at every level and in every institution - face vexing issues and trade-offs. Many flounder, especially in a turbulent era when confronted with multiple crises and constituencies demanding change. How to bridge these gaps requires a new understanding of just what trust is, how it can be built, and regained when lost.

Trust is, however, an elusive, even mushy, concept. Sandra Sucher and Shalene Gupta examine the science behind trust, grounding our understanding of why we humans trust in the first place, describing how customers, employees, community members and investors decide whether an organization or a person can be trusted. Creating and sustaining trust does not, they show, come from "reputation-building" and PR but by being the "real deal," creating products, services, and technologies that work, having good intentions, treating people fairly, and taking responsibility for all the impacts an organization creates, whether intended or not.

Then, through a framing of how to think through the elements of trust - competence, motives, means, impact - combined with in-depth stories from twenty years of research we emerge with a new understanding of the business, economic and societal importance of trust and how to regain it once lost. How to, in short, bridge the gap from where you are to where you should be.