
The Trust Crisis - dredmorbius
https://hbr.org/cover-story/2019/07/the-trust-crisis
======
vincent-toups
The idea of trusting any institution whose naked reason for existing is making
money is absurd. Neither employees nor customers should expect anything from
businesses but a concerted, rational, attempt to separate them from whatever
value they might be capable of giving up and as cheaply as possible.

Its crazy that these institutions, which are fully rational in their pursuit
of profit, want to gussy up their relationship with customers and employees as
"personal" when it manifestly isn't. They see you as an entry in a spreadsheet
but they want you to see them as a warm friend.

~~~
chasd00
I've always felt the common relationship between employer/employee was
strange. One one hand you have employers who demand loyalty and commitment, on
the other you have employees who have the "i've worked here so long, you owe
me" mentality. To me, unless your paycheck bounces then your employer doesn't
owe you anything. As for employees, unless you're cheating your employer out
of what they're getting for their money then employees owe their employer
nothing.

if you go to work, do your job as per the job description and contract you
signed and, in return, your employer compensates you per the contract then the
deal is square.

The "relationship" from business to customer is even more ridiculous. From my
perspective as a customer, i'm giving you money in exchange for something of
equal value subject to the terms of deal. That's it. To say an organization is
a "trusted friend", whether for-profit or not, is crazy.

~~~
vincent-toups
I actually believe that this state of affairs is really unhealthy for human
beings, who are psychologically constructed to want actual relationships
rather than transactions in their life. But it is the current paradigm.

~~~
chasd00
i know what you mean but work is not the place for that. Your life is the
place for that but I'm opening a whole other can of discussion worms.

------
redleggedfrog
Huh. It says, "losing the public’s faith." When did we _ever_ trust them?

I can't argue with, "Reality: Trust is managed from the inside out — by
running a good business." And the article does throw out there companies that
tried. But the reality is 99% of the companies of the world are, by their
nature, selfish entities, and will eventually degrade into doing untrustworthy
things. It's the nature of the beast.

And those of us that deal with them, while potentially gaining some benefit,
should treat them with suspicion. Any "faith" is misplaced.

~~~
dredmorbius
Gallup polls for public trust in institutions, including business:

[https://news.gallup.com/poll/1597/confidence-
institutions.as...](https://news.gallup.com/poll/1597/confidence-
institutions.aspx)

Pew conduct similar research: [https://www.pewresearch.org/topics/trust-in-
government/](https://www.pewresearch.org/topics/trust-in-government/)

~~~
redleggedfrog
Under Big Business, it shows "Some" and "Very Little" as being the most
prevalent categories. Sounds like a lack of trust to me.

~~~
dredmorbius
I hadn't looked closely yet. The values are remarkably consistent (and low)
since 1973, with the high-water mark for "Great deal/Quite a lot" being 34%,
in 1975. Presently 23%.

Compare at 68% for small business.

------
amelius
I think it should be possible for companies to lose their trademarks, if they
commit too many violations.

Brands/trademarks are a token of trust, after all.

~~~
prewett
Brands/trademarks are an identifier, actually not a token of trust. I don't
have much trust in "Walmart", "Capital One", or "Oracle", but a brand isn't
about trust, it is about identifying goods and services. The brand/trademark
is there to identify those cheap goods as from Walmart, Inc. (as opposed to,
say K-mart), that overly-expensive, poor-performing database as from Oracle,
Inc (as opposed to, say, the not-as-expensive SQL Server). Of course, you
generally want your brand/trademark to be trusted, but they are an identifier,
not a symbol of trust.

In fact, a token of trust cannot be created by the company, it has to be
created by the people who trust it (the consumer). The fact that people pre-
order a game or a Tesla is a token of trust, but the name Tesla is not a token
of trust. "Tesla" might be a trusted brand, but it is not a token of trust.

Now the case of Amazon is interesting. Amazon has created a system where the
brand actually has no meaning, because they will co-mingle inventory from
anyone who claims it is identical, in particular, counterfeits. So I buy
something with brand X, but there is actually no guarantee that it actually
came from the makers of X. So Amazon's marketplace actually undermines brands.
A world without brands/trademarks looks like Fulfilled by Amazon, not like a
bunch of untrusted goods and services. The problem with Fulfilled by Amazon is
that there is no guarantee that the item is what it claims it is and the whole
point of brands/trademarks is to uniquely identify an item.

~~~
amelius
> Brands/trademarks are an identifier, actually not a token of trust.

If that were true, why don't companies switch brands when people lose trust in
them? They are free to do so, but somehow they don't.

Often, the brand is a company's greatest asset, and revoking a brand/trademark
would be a far greater punishment than a fine, which is often just a slap on
the fingers.

Also, it would warn users. If I buy at Amazon, and suddenly have to buy at X
then that reminds me that the company cannot be trusted and has to regain my
trust. I think it would be the perfect punishment in many cases. A monetary
punishment is often difficult to get right.

------
vivekd
I know my dad was loyal to the company he worked for, and he declined many
other better offers, gave up seeing his family, and devoted himself to them.
Some time later, the corporation was bought up, his immediate boss left and he
was downsized.

The issue with large corporations is that there is no real person behind them.
The board can change, the owners can change - and these changes can happen
dramatically overnight.

It's impossible to maintain trust in an organization like that because when an
organization makes a decision, it's difficult to know who the main actors are
and impossible to know who the main actors will be.

But I suppose there can be short term trust for corporations that have
dominant individuals with dominant philosophies. We know that as long as Bezos
is head, we can trust Amazon to think long term. We knew that was long as Sam
Walton was around Walmart would prioritize low prices. But on top of that it's
difficult to assign trust to an entity whose actions are the result of an ever
changing and difficult to identify set of people.

------
samirillian
Lost me in the first paragraph. Manifestly, the buck stops with the
shareholders. Acting like culturing "trust" can be pinched off from
prioritizing shareholders over other stakeholders (users) is disingenuous.

~~~
everybodyknows
I slogged onward to the second paragraph, where we have this:

>When we decide to interact with a company, we believe it won’t deceive us or
abuse its relationship with us.

How anyone who's looked at the headlines generated by the grifting of telcos
and banks over the last ten years could write this, and then get it a first-
tier B-school to publish it, should give us pause for thought.

The revelation comes a bit further on:

>Currently, Sucher and Gupta are cowriting a book on trust, Trusted: How
Companies Build It, Lose It, and Regain It.

The selling of trust repair services is the very special own business of the
authors.

------
Excel_Wizard
The unknown that remains is whether we have lost trust 1) because we have
higher expectations, or 2) because the institutions and companies are failing
us more than they did before, or 3) because we have greater visibility into a
similar level of failure as we had in the past.

My belief and hope is that it is a combination of 1 and 3.

~~~
dredmorbius
The degree to which lists of corporate scandals are near-end loaded is
concerning, though this may reflect recency bias.

Wikipedia is particularly prone to this, though I'm finding few other reliable
sources with a different picture.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_corporate_collapses_an...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_corporate_collapses_and_scandals)
\

A 2009 SSRN paper suggests growing pressures:

[https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1440769](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1440769)

------
DiseasedBadger
If a government can compel someone to interfere with a user's account or data,
secretly, then only your own isolated hardware, can be trusted.

Then end.

------
titojankowski
10 pages on trust and not one mention of digital trust or blockchain!

------
natrik
Initially thought this article was going to be on the lack of trust regarding
media/news...

------
dkarl
_Businesses put an awful lot of effort into meeting the diverse needs of their
stakeholders — customers, investors, employees, and society at large. But
they’re not paying enough attention to one ingredient that’s crucial to
productive relationships with those stakeholders: trust._

Wow. This slime was almost enough to put me right off reading the rest of the
article. It's transparently about putting the "needs" (greed) of investors and
shareholders above the "needs" (privacy, safety, etc.) of customers, but let's
pretend we're doing a great job for everybody and the only thing that has gone
awry is a subjective feeling in the minds of people who are bothered by our
actions.

Even after reading the rest of the article, I think maybe the opening sentence
_should_ have put me off reading it, because despite all the right things
being said about betrayal of trust and a puppy in an overhead storage bin,
you're still reading it all in the context of an opening sentence that said,
"Don't worry, you're reading the Harvard Business Review, we know you're a
good person and doing a great job and you shouldn't really have to bother with
this."

~~~
ssivark
> _Betrayals of trust have major financial consequences._

LOL at the tone-deafness of the article. Why would/should people trust a
bureaucracy that tries to put profit above people?

The other funny thing is whether readers trust advice from B-school
professors. Arguably, a lot of the current ails of modern business (including
the public's lack of trust in them) result from following wisdom professed by
B-school faculty in MBA courses.

> _So our need to trust and be trusted has a very real economic impact. More
> than that, it deeply affects the fabric of society. If we can’t trust other
> people, we’ll avoid interacting with them, which will make it hard to build
> anything, solve problems, or innovate._

They've got the priority order backwards.

~~~
nradov
Have you actually attended MBA courses? That's not what was taught in mine.

~~~
ssivark
I've attended several lectures & discussions, and read a few standard
recommended books (by no means am I claiming thoroughness). Though my comment
was a touch flippant and used a broad brush, I was basically paraphrasing what
I've heard from Clay Christensen and Rebecca Henderson (both HBS faculty) on
why large organizations make certain typical mistakes, derived from
contemporary wisdom (also taught in B-schools).

------
hogFeast
What garbage. Trust isn't a dependent variable. You can't measure it. You
can't produce it in a factory. The reason why people don't trust X business is
because they are untrustworthy. They will be unable to win trust back because
being untrustworthy is, often, a fundamental part of their culture.

Also, a minor point in the grand scheme of things but I wouldn't take advice
on trust from someone who had a fictional job title at Fidelity. From someone
who worked in the industry, the business model of an asset manager is: do a
shitty job, tell everyone you how smart you are (preferably with the aid of
functionally useless qualifications), and hope no-one calls you on your
bullshit. If you perceive yourself to be an expert on trust, don't work for
organisations that have made untrustworthiness their business model. Doing so,
suggests that you don't know what you are doing (which is likely the case
here).

~~~
DuskStar
> The reason why people don't trust X business is because they are
> untrustworthy.

Some businesses are untrusted despite being objectively trustworthy, and the
other way around. Would you have trusted VW not to cheat on emissions tests
five years ago?

~~~
celticmusic
No, anyone who trusts any company is a fool.

~~~
concert-gilled
Trust is about degrees. How much time and money do you spend the verify the
statements/actions/products of companies?

~~~
celticmusic
none, instead I position myself such that I don't have to trust them.

For example: I don't trust netflix to correctly charge me every month, so I
review my accounts.

