For most of the last century, a company could manage its own reputation. A PR agency wrote the story, an ad campaign polished it, and when something went wrong on the factory floor, it usually died in a hallway conversation before any customer heard about it. That arrangement is gone now. Nobody owns the narrative anymore except the marketplace itself, and the CEOs who still act like they control the story are the ones getting blindsided.
Gal Borenstein has spent nearly 30 years watching that blindside happen, advising CEOs on how to protect their reputation and scale in high-risk environments. His reframe is blunt. Trust is not a value you put in a mission statement next to words like innovation and integrity. It is the mechanism that decides whether a company grows or collapses, because the people who decide whether to trust a brand are no longer newspaper editors. They are customers with a bad experience and phones in their hands.
Trust is no longer just a value. Trust is what drives success and failure.
Why Do So Many Executives Believe Silence Means Success?
I found this out firsthand at a resort in Las Vegas that advertised itself as luxury and delivered something well below it. When I finally got a manager, I found a woman who clearly cared and clearly had no authority to fix anything. I told her plainly that the decisions in place were costing her company plenty of bad reviews and bad word of mouth that would never come off the internet, and she didn’t argue.
Borenstein sees the same pattern across company after company, and he does not dress it up. Executives blame understaffing, an overwhelmed call center, a broken app, anything except themselves for not listening. His answer to that whole category of excuse is short: “This is all bullshit.”
What matters more than listening to the people paying you? Borenstein asks. After all, they are the ones keeping the lights on. A company with zero complaints is not a healthy company. It is a company nobody trusts enough to complain to directly anymore, which is worse.
The Survey That Got an Agency Fired for Telling the Truth
Borenstein once ran a trust benchmark for an information technology client, scoring ten attributes independently through the CEO and through the management team underneath him. One attribute asked a plain question: is this company financially strong?
The CEO answered with total confidence, describing a business that was growing and getting ready to acquire competitors. His own managers, sitting two doors down from that office, scored the same question a one, two, or three out of ten. Several said they simply did not know.
Borenstein’s team presented those results in a room with the CEO present, exactly as promised: non-attributional, aggregated, nothing traced back to a single manager. The CEO fired the agency on the spot.
It played out like the old story of the emperor with no clothes, except this time the tailors got fired for pointing out the obvious. A company that punishes the messenger for an accurate scorecard is not protecting its brand. It is guaranteeing that the next bad number nobody tells it about will be the one that breaks something.
Trust Starts Inside the Building, Not in the Press Release
Borenstein calls his model for building trust the Guardian framework, and it rests on collaboration and transparency inside a company before either one gets to matter outside it. Ask the floor staff, the middle managers, and the executive suite of most companies what the company’s values are, and the three groups will give you three answers that do not agree with each other. That gap is where trust breaks, long before it ever shows up in a bad review.
His fix for that gap is simple to say and hard to do. “You don’t start by taking care of the outside first. You have to take care of the inside.”
He points to an HVAC company running a strong commercial about its cooling season readiness, only to have two technicians badmouth the company inside a customer’s own house, because nobody had ever trained or aligned them on what the company was supposed to stand for. The advertising made a promise the operation never bothered to keep.
The same gap sank Facebook’s credibility with a large number of users who felt like their data and likenesses were casually being sold to advertisers. Rebuilding that trust took years of visible changes rather than a single apology. It’s also why a Burger King ad campaign, admitting the food had slipped and promising to fix it, read as unusual rather than reckless. Most companies would rather bury a weakness than name it first.
There’s an old trial lawyer’s rule I have followed for years: when there’s a weakness in your argument, be the one who brings it up. Hide it, and whoever finds it will present you in the worst possible light there is.
Get Ahead of the Story in the First Twenty-Four Hours, or Someone Else Writes It
The cost of skipping all of this shows up at scale too. A major aviation company built decades of trust on being the safety-first choice in its industry. Then a quality assurance employee flagged a widget that was falling apart. That information never made it up through the layers of management fast enough to matter.
A crash followed, then a year of crisis communication and management changes just to rebuild what silence inside the company had cost it. Nobody in that chain thought they were doing anything wrong. They each just assumed someone above them already knew.
Borenstein’s advice for the first twenty-four hours of any crisis runs against what most legal departments recommend. Lawyers tend to counsel silence, worried that any acknowledgment creates liability down the road.
Borenstein argues the opposite. Respond fast, respond like an actual person, and admit what needs admitting, because “Anything that sounds genuine and creates a conversation kills the sting of a review that is killing your company’s reputation.”
That means setting up basic social listening, even something as simple as a Google Alert for your own company name, and building a small tactical response team. Two or three people in marketing are enough to start, as long as they start before the story breaks rather than scrambling after it does.
Benchmark It Honestly, Then Fix It
Borenstein’s actual system for building trust is less mysterious than the crises that make companies finally ask for it. Score the business honestly across ten attributes, including marketing, sales, quality assurance, operations, HR, and finance. A low score at the start is not a failure. It is data. Build an action plan against it, put it in front of the management team so every department owns its own piece of the score, and measure it again months later.
That is the real shift Borenstein is arguing for, and it holds up precisely because it is not a slogan. “Trust is no longer just a value. Trust is what drives success and failure.”
A company that scores itself honestly at a three has more useful information sitting on its desk than the company that assumes it is already a ten. One of them has a plan. The other has a headline waiting to happen.