In these uncertain times, trust has never mattered more. This is especially true for business: a recent study by Deloitte finds that a scandal or adverse event related to trust can erode a company’s market cap by up to fifty percent and 85 percent of customers will abandon a brand in the wake of such an incident. Even if customers return, the economic impact of trust is undeniable, but what is it? Poorly understood, efforts to build corporate trust are often nothing more than meaningless exercises in reputation management.
According to Harvard Business School experts Sandra J. Sucher and Shalene Gupta trust is indeed definable, measurable, unfixed, and salvageable. In The Power of Trust: How Companies Build It, Lose It, Regain It, they distill two decades of research to give trust a spine and provide a framework to help companies understand what trust is and how to earn it.
Sandra Sucher, professor of management practice at Harvard Business School, is an internationally recognized trust expert. She studies trust and how it can be managed —intentionally—as a business asset. Her research focuses on trust-critical challenges like building trust in the adoption of AI, during layoffs and restructuring, while navigating reputation threats, and following headline-level trust breaches. Sucher’s findings are broadly applicable to leaders managing persistent uncertainty.
Research
Trust is the most powerful force underlying the success of every business. Yet it can be shattered in an instant, with a devastating impact on a company’s market cap and reputation. In this research, I help leaders understand how trust proves critical at moments of greatest stress for organizations
Photo by Evgenia Eliseeva
Photo by Julia Featheringill
John Hamilton “Jack” Bush (March 20, 1909 – January 24, 1977) was a Canadian abstract painter. A member of Painters Eleven, his paintings are associated with the Color Field movement and Post-Painterly Abstraction. Inspired by Henri Matisse and American abstract expressionist painters like Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis, Bush’s vibrant paintings are joyful and poignant.