I didn't set out to write a book about trust.
I set out to answer a question that had been nagging me for thirty years: Why do some systems work beautifully while others, with more resources and smarter people, fail spectacularly?
I'd seen it at IBM in the early '90s. At Charles Schwab during the dot-com boom. In my own startup. In the schools my six children attended. In the neighborhoods we lived in.
The pattern was always the same: the systems that worked were the ones where people trusted each other. The ones that failed were the ones where they didn't.
The Thirty-Year Thread
At IBM, I watched brilliant engineers build products nobody wanted — because the people making decisions didn't trust the people closest to the customers.
At Schwab, I saw what happened when a company that had earned trust started optimizing for metrics instead of relationships.
In my startup, I learned firsthand that the gap between a team that trusts each other and one that doesn't isn't measured in productivity percentages. It's measured in whether the company survives.
The Family Connection
But it was raising six children that crystallized the idea.
Every parent knows the moment: your child is old enough to walk to school alone, or stay home by themselves, or borrow the car. You face a choice between control and trust.
The research is clear: children who are trusted develop better judgment than children who are controlled. But the research doesn't capture the leap of faith required. You don't trust because you have evidence it will work. You trust because the alternative — a life of escalating control — doesn't work at all.
The Book
The Trust Economy is my attempt to show that this insight scales.
From families to companies to nations, the math is the same: trust is the most efficient form of capital ever invented, and we're systematically underinvesting in it.
I wrote this book because I believe we're at an inflection point. The tools exist to build high-trust systems at scale. The evidence is overwhelming that they outperform. The only thing missing is the decision to try.