Be It Resolved: Trust Is a Zero-Sum Game

So let's work at it from the converse for a second, because I doubt anybody's going to say it's a bad idea to have trust.

But let's look at it from the opposite, which is to say, what happens if you don't have trust? We've talked about trust being the lifeblood of corporate governance.

We've talked about the fact that trust is right in the very purpose of the Institute of Corporate Directors.

So we take this very seriously.

But Bruce, I think you've talked about what happens if you don't have trust.

Maybe I'll start with you and then come to Kathleen.

Well, I love your point about how everybody says they want trust.

I've never met anybody in an audience about who stands up and says, Bruce, I don't want trust.

However, I rarely meet people who will tell me they have a deliberate plan to build trust.

It's something that people talk about is important, but which they don't really focus on as a deliberate act and they take it for granted.

I like the analogy that trust should be treated like a battery where you're constantly charging it up, doing things that help to build up the charge in that battery of trust.

And then there'll be times when you need to draw down on it.

What I would say is for boards, for CEOs is have an understanding internally about what is the definition of trust and how it affects our business.

Look at the audiences that matter for us with trust.

Do we do surveys to understand our employee trust, our customer trust? There are questions that you can ask in a survey to get at the drivers of trust.

The academics have studied these.

They're well-known.

You can design a survey and track trust with your audiences if you really care enough about it.

So Kathleen, great segue to you.

Trust, nice to have or need to have?

Trust is an absolute need to have.

And I think the right way to kind of look at this from an economic perspective is a bit through like the prisoner's dilemma, right? So we're probably all pretty familiar with the dilemma, but it's a thought experiment.

It basically means, you know, two prisoners, they have to cooperate.

When they cooperate, they end up bitter off.

And in game theory, it dictates that unless they can communicate ahead of time and have a reason to trust each other, then they won't cooperate and they'll be selfish and they'll wind up collectively worse off, right? And so from an economics perspective, You know, when you have a loss of trust, it's essentially like a deadweight loss, right? You can imagine even sort of in neighborhoods and when things are frequently stolen, there's a lot of measures and expense that you have to go to to prevent that.