Sarah Mosseri, author of Trust Fall, reads the FedMart board against her own research — 'trust is not a thing a company has'

Mosseri studies workplace equity and wrote Trust Fall, a book about how organisations hollow out the trust they advertise. Reading Incorruptible, she stops on a line about FedMart's board and recognises her own subject in it: a board treating the trust Sol Price had built with customers as latitude to spend rather than a relationship to maintain. She uses the case to sharpen her own argument — that trust is not an asset a company holds but a reflection of relationships requiring continued investment — and reads its fetishization as hollowing out how people connect at work.

“Organizations celebrate trust, measure it, put it in rankings, because trust buys latitude. What gets lost is that trust is not a thing a company has. Trust reflects relationships that must be maintained and invested in.” — Sarah Mosseri on LinkedIn