The Power of Trust How Companies Build It, Lose It, Regain It

A ground-breaking exploration of the changing nature of trust and how to bridge the gap from where you are to where you need to be.
  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. How to build and sustain trust requires fresh insight into why customers, employees, community members, and investors decide whether an organization can be trusted.

Based on two decades of research and illustrated through vivid storytelling, Sandra J. Sucher and Shalene Gupta examine the economic impact of trust and the science behind it, and conclusively prove that trust is built from the inside out. Trust emerges from a company being the “real deal”: creating products and services that work, having good intentions, treating people fairly, and taking responsibility for all the impacts an organization creates, whether intended or not.

When trust is in the room, great things can happen. Sucher and Gupta’s innovative foundation for executing the elements of trust—competence, motives, means, impact—explains how trust can be woven into the day-to-day and the long term. Most importantly, even when lost, trust can be regained, as illustrated through their accounts of companies across the globe that pull themselves out of scandal and corruption by rebuilding the vital elements of trust.

Sandra Sucher is a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School, where she has been teaching for the last twenty years. She's an advisor to the Edelman Trust Barometer, and has spoken about trust at Edelman and numerous companies and at Harvard Business School events. She provides expert commentary for Bloomberg, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, NPR and Fortune. Prior to teaching at Harvard, Sucher had a two-decade career as a senior level executive and business 'fixer,' specializing in uncovering complex organization problems and creating new ways to address them. She lives in Massachusetts.
Shalene Gupta is a research associate at Harvard Business School. She is a former Fortune reporter, who covered diversity in Silicon Valley, big data and smart cities. She lives in Massachusetts.