A Looming Threat to Business
Monday, September 15, 2025
Trust is no longer optional — it’s essential for navigating business, technology and institutional uncertainty today.
Stephen Covey’s quotes serve as a launching pad for a topic that is more slippery than we would like. These quotes represent the typical approach for discussing trust in the province of corporate management where we seek to build efficient organizations, where employees can flourish, and where customers are motivated to choose our products.
Ros Taylor’s The Future of Trust
However, Ros Taylor’s The Future of Trust broadens the discussion of trust to include the challenges facing the entire ecosystem in which our company operates, a sphere that includes not only people — customers, employees, suppliers, regulators, stakeholders — but institutions as well: the banking system, technology, the rule of law, tax and trade environments and many others. The nature of trust in these spheres is enormously important to how we assess the risks and opportunities for our business organizations in the coming years.
Imagine a simple scenario: On the way to work, an executive sits down in a coffee shop to read an article online, sipping coffee just purchased with an app. His mortgage is paid by an automatic draw on his bank account, which has sufficient funds because he has auto deposit from his employer. Taxes and deductions follow preset formulas. As he reads, an email from a colleague contains a summary of yesterday’s client meeting and a game plan to meet that client’s needs. A second email has an alert about news breaking over social media about this same client — news requiring an urgent Zoom call to discuss changes to the game plan and the appropriate response.
How many “trust” issues can we count in this scenario? Is the payment app secure? How about the bank account, the payment systems and the sufficiency of tax payments? Is the summary of the meeting written by artificial intelligence? If so, do we trust it is not hallucinating or riddled with algorithmic bias? Are employees working from home? If so, are they working? Is the information on social media factual, misinformation or a deepfake? Is the coffee safe to drink?
Perhaps you trust all of these platforms. Do you trust that your tax data, your financial data, your online reading history and your email communications are not being scraped and consolidated by a data broker? What will be done with that data? Can these systems be hacked by phishing criminals? What about the government? Do you trust that your personal data will not be put through an algorithm that will predict you are a noncitizen, or a tax cheat? Can you prove you have a valid driver’s license, or can you prove you are a citizen? Can you prove you paid your taxes?
Perhaps you judge these questions to be outlandish or spurious. But what if your customers begin to harbor these doubts? How does your business strategy begin to change if your employees do not share your trust? Or competitors, or regulators, or suppliers, or stockholders?
The entire battery of institutions that comprises the platform upon which our businesses flourish is fundamental to success. The issue of trust in these institutions, while usually discussed under the banner of political or societal discourse, is in fact integral to the long-term survival and success of business today.
Our goal for managers, being strategic and aware, is to develop a clarity of vision that avoids the perils of mistrust that may insinuate itself into employee thinking. But the risk to the business enterprise is not found solely inside the company, but also in the irrational attitudes of large sectors of people wholly outside management’s control. Customers, suppliers, “the internet,” influencers, public figures — all of these can, intentionally or inadvertently, foment distrust of the institutions comprising the societal market platform. Viewed in isolation, a company’s management team can be overwhelmed by deteriorating trust in institutions completely outside its control.
General Notions About Trust
Taylor begins by discussing the very notion of trust. For example, she differentiates the difference between interpersonal trust vs. institutional trust.
Using a metaphor, we can all relate to driving a car in traffic. “Interpersonal trust” is in play when we approach an intersection with a green light, and we know the other driver approaching the intersection will stop at the red light. “Institutional trust” is the trust that, if that driver fails to obey, resulting in damage or injury, the bundle of institutions comprising our driving and traffic infrastructure (laws, traffic cops, courts, insurance, etc.) will hold the other driver accountable and reimburse us for damage and harm. Institutional trust makes us citizens. Interpersonal trust makes us human.
Our feelings and approach to interpersonal and institutional trust are not congruent.
Interpersonal trust is hard to define. Taylor writes, “Social scientists have spent a long time thinking about how to define and measure it. … (asking) people whether they agree or disagree with statements like, ‘You can’t rely on anyone these days;’ or, ‘In general, people can be trusted.’ Interpersonal trust is more of a vibe, an intangible bundle of faith, hope and confidence.”
Institutional trust is different. We approach the issue with skepticism — we expect and accept checks and balances, security protocols, and procedures. However, like the coffee café example cited earlier, there are dozens of institutions, from payment systems to banks, to government agencies to public health agencies — so many that it can become difficult to trust them all. Moreover, being treated unfairly is highly corrosive. Once trust is lost, people are motivated to find trust elsewhere — and not necessarily from a better source.
“When infinite alternative narratives are available, ‘just trust us’ is unsustainable,” writes Taylor. (p. 29)
Frontiers for Trust in the Future – Online Presence, Artificial Intelligence, Rule of Law
Whether or not our company’s business model is specifically geared to the online world or artificial intelligence, in a highly regulated sector like finance, it is fair to say that our customers, employees, suppliers and stakeholders will be increasingly affected by trends and developments in these areas. The potential for fundamental trust in our company, leadership and profitability will be either bolstered or undermined by trends and developments in these areas.
Business Online
Will our company have an online presence? Will that be for marketing, for sales, or for operations? Each one of these introduces different questions about trust.
- Identification: How will identifications be verified in the increasingly online world? Will you trust the customers and counterparties you find there? How will your company ensure stakeholders can cross-check your company’s ID? For example, how can a customer quickly discover that an urgent text message demanding payment is a phishing scam?
- Surveillance: Will our company be a data extractor? Will it guard the data it collects? How? Will customers trust the company’s stewardship of their data? What strategies will the company undertake when their customer data is “hacked” and stolen?
- Privacy: The deeper our company’s relationship is with online stakeholders, the more they must trust it. This trust will facilitate business success, but it will also lead to strategic decisions about how best to care for that data, especially when tempted to monetize the data for greater returns. What assurances does our company provide to stakeholders about monetizing their data?
Artificial Intelligence, Robots
AI and robotics are accelerating and will pose thorny trust issues.
- General Usage: Will our employees use AI for their work? If, so will it hallucinate? Will it be skewed by algorithmic bias?
- Transparency: Does anyone really understand the workings of AI? How do we disclose and authenticate the services and relationships that AI has facilitated in our business? Referring to complex administration systems, Taylor writes, “When the book is rewritten in a language that only a few specialists can understand, trust will break down further, and a sense of injustice and alienation is likely to grow.” (P. 94). Generalizing this insight to business operations, any company that cannot explain how it is engaging its customers bears the risk of alienating its stakeholders.
- Dovetailing this aspect of trust, Robert Capps has written a recent New York Times piece (“AI Might Take Your Job. Here are 22 New Ones It Might Give You”1. The article outlines the potential need for corporations to establish new job functions, such as AI translators, auditors and authenticators to manage the flow of AI. Going further, AI ethicists, consistency coordinators and AI escalation officers will be needed to oversee not only the customer’s corporate relationship with “the machine,” but all stakeholders as well.
Regulatory Environment – Rule of Law
Whatever our political opinions regarding the changes wrought by the new administration in Washington, it is fair to say that disruption creates uncertainty, and uncertainty strains the trust in societal institutions and corporations alike: “The sense that rights and freedoms are not settled but can be taken away by an over-reaching state, which is a defining characteristic of 21st-century politics, is deeply corrosive of trust.” (p 51).
- Employee and customer pool — Does our company rely on workers or consumers who are at risk for deportation?
- Supply chain — Will tariffs affect our supply chain?
- Regulatory Environment — Many business advocates generally view regulation as bad. Are the new standards that apply to our company’s sector so lax as to destroy consumer trust in the entire sector, regardless of how high our own company’s standards are?
- Marketing, Identity, Political Correctness — Will our efforts to project strong values run afoul of government sanctions for rhetoric suddenly deemed taboo, particularly efforts toward diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)? While your company is attempting to build trust and brand positivity with its online presence, advertising, and overall conduct, the channels of communicating its virtues will be the arena in which it can be excoriated for messaging that it not politically correct.
- Business strategy and political corruption — Will competitors receive regulatory favors or government support due to political relationships and financial contributions unrelated to market advantages? Will consumer trust suffer, not due to our company’s failings, but due to the loss of trust in the entire market?
- Disillusionment — What happens when people, our company stakeholders, become disillusioned and start to distrust our institutions, because their banking accounts, for example, have been hacked. How does the company whose data was stolen rectify the breach and protect those whose personal identity and information was stolen and possibly used? Does this become generalized as cynicism? What happens when individual cynicism becomes so widespread that it becomes part of the culture?
Summary
Taylor writes, “The job of establishing who is genuinely trustworthy and who isn’t is the work of a lifetime,” (P. 65) and “[the] desire to place our trust in something that would deserve it will not go away.” (P. 139)
People tend to trust or at least have the urge to trust people. There is still a shock -— “I trusted you!” — when people let us down, even in casual relationships. In terms of societal trust in our institutions, Taylor writes, “Most of us are still at the I trusted you stage of shock and disillusionment — still willing to be convinced that government could act to address the uncertainty we feel.” (P. 139) She adds that“ …trust in government is reciprocal — a leader who inspires confidence need not resort to harsh policing and complex laws to persuade people to do as they say.” (P. 132)
While Taylor is writing about governmental trust, we can still learn by extension and apply these principles to our corporate and business institutions as well.
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Categories: Business