So. Did you know that no one trusts anyone anymore?

And did you know that it's managers' fault?

You see, every time managers, in pursuit of monthly targets and KPIs nobody remembers the purpose of, lie a little, avoid the truth a little, and deploy corporate jargon specifically engineered to say nothing, contribute to this loss of trust.

And loss of trust in how the world works leads people to tribalism, division, and eventually nationalism and extremism. 

Are you saying, Sultanbek, you would ask, that every time we lie on a Teams call to save face, we are personally pushing people toward becoming Nazis and terrorists?

Yep... kind of... at least partially... hyperbolically... to make a point. Please do not email me.

The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer, an annual study by a global PR consultancy. PR on trust. Anyhow. The findings are excellent.

First: people's trust in institutions, companies included, keeps eroding, and the world's most developed economies now sit at the bottom of the rankings. The places with the courts, the free press, the elections... those places.

We will come back to this.

Second: when people lose trust in institutions, they relocate their trust to people who look and think exactly like them, and mistrust everyone who doesn't. Historically, a fantastic development.

The report states that a crisis of grievance has matured into a crisis of insularity. Seven in ten people globally are now unwilling or hesitant to trust someone with different values, social views, backgrounds, or information sources. In Japan, it's 90%. Germany: 81%. UK 76%. US 70%.

In the words of the firm's CEO, Richard Edelman:

The Trust Index bottom five is almost all of the G7: Japan 38, France 42, Germany 44, UK 44, US 47. The happy globalization we like talking about here promised convergence. It delivered. Everyone is converging on not trusting anyone.

So what does this have to do with the corporate world? You see, regardless of geography or culture, the most economically active people on earth are being processed by the same corporate machine.

I would therefore partially blame the corporate grift culture we built and maintain, in which nothing connects to anything tangible anymore. Fomonomics stuff. When value is narrative, how can we expect people to trust anything?

First: normal humans barely interact with government institutions. We read about them, we frown at the news, we move on. The institution we actually experience, daily, bodily, is the workplace. Your department is the country/microcosm you live in.

The manager is the proxy through which people decide whether the system, in general, is fair. Nobody forms their theory of justice at the constitutional court. They form it in the meeting where the credit for their work went to someone else.

And this works in reverse, which to me was an interesting finding in the report. When the workplace feels fair, and the bosses don't lie, it becomes the most trusted institution people have.

In some measures, business is rated more ethical and trustworthy than NGOs and government. When we do things correctly, we become the last church standing.

Feel honoured. Now try to feel the responsibility. Now stop lying on Teams calls.

Second: as humans, we are wired for fairness. When decisions feel fair, we can accept almost anything, including bad news. We sleep fine knowing that somewhere, someone at least weighed justice before deciding our lives.

Fittingly, the word "fair" comes from Germanic roots meaning "beautiful, pleasant."

And when we feel the opposite, we use a heavier word: exploitation. That word entered English meaning, simply, "to work" the land, from Latin through Old French.

In the 19th century, during the Industrial Revolution, it soured into something unfair. And then a certain bearded German gentleman living in London, named Karl, made it the permanent technical term for what happens to workers who are paid less than their work is worth.

Don't get me wrong.

I am a capitalist through and through. With businesses, and stuff. But precisely as a capitalist, I cannot ignore that the doctrine we started with, introduced by Milton Friedman in a 1970 New York Times essay declaring that the only social responsibility of business is to increase its profits, is delivering us to a world that will be increasingly... fascistic, I suppose, is the technical term.

And AI, bless it, is not helping. Consider the newest achievement of corporate civilisation, a genuine crime against everything the word "fair" ever meant: algorithmic pricing.

Our entire species-level agreement on fairness fits in one sentence: same price for the same thing, same pay for the same work.

We also agree that the opposite of a well-run, fair organisation is a Bazaar.

I don't think anyone reading this would disagree that there is nothing more infuriating than walking through a bazaar suspecting that every seller is reading you for the maximum extractable price. We are convinced that everyone there is simply there to exploit you.

My mother used to come home furious that she'd been overcharged for tomatoes simply because she dressed well. The seller ran an algorithmic judgment on her willingness to pay. The algorithm wore a moustache and sat on a crate (In my shovenistic mind, this algorithm was from the Caucasus, which is ok because I am from there as well)

Now imagine if this gentleman with the moustache selling tomatoes had had the opportunity to actually look into my mother's bank account and purchase history, as well as information about our guests and when they were coming for dinner. It would have been a much more profitable bazaar. And with algorithmic pricing, we are not far away from exactly that behaviour.

Delta was accused of price discrimination as the CEO's words about AI-driven individualized ticket pricing were interpreted as such.

One of JetBlue's customers reported a $230 fare increase for funeral travel: the algorithm, commentators had inferred, correctly, that grief is a price-sensitivity-decreasing factor. The class action suit is still pending.

Instacart is currently under FTC investigation after Consumer Reports found its pricing experiments could cost some customers $1,200 a year extra on groceries, or as the industry prefers to call it, personalization.

Meanwhile, on the other side, companies experiment with algorithmic wage-setting: different pay for the same work, based on workers' desperation.

The pincer, as regular readers know, closes from both ends. Your income personalised downward, your prices personalised upward, your data doing both jobs at once. You know, hard to feel that everything is fair.

So when we feel that things are genuinely unfair, it is no surprise that we find comfort in familiarity. We hope that if a person speaks like us, looks like us, reads the same news, lives in the same area, then this person can be trusted. And the others, of course, cannot.

Research by the National Bureau of Economic Research (Fos, Kempf and Tsoutsoura) matched the top five executives of 1,500 large US companies against actual voter registration records, going back two decades.

Findings: executive teams are increasingly dominated by a single political party, the sorting nearly doubled between 2008 and 2022, and it accelerated sharply after 2016. The misaligned executive leaves; the new hire matches the team's majority; the tribe completes itself.

Executives are self-segregating by ideology twice as fast as the general population around them. The researchers ran a thousand simulations of randomly assembled teams; real executive teams were more tribal than almost every simulation.

Now, the problem is that the workplace used to be, according to the literature, one of the last places where different "tribes" actually met. This is increasingly less true, at least in the US, as corporations tribalize.

So, to conclude. Given that we are here in Meme Guide to Management, fans of Systems thinking.

Why do we do it? Because we are human. The tribe is the oldest insurance policy we have.

So, all of it, the whole chain, grievance to insularity to whatever comes after insularity, is there at least partially because of us. It started every time someone pushed a narrative in a corporate meeting instead of the truth, because the numbers needed to look a certain way, because everyone does it. After all, we didn't know better.

Now we know better.

Stop lying on Teams calls.

Talk soon,
Sultanbek