EP 427: The Trust-Profit Paradox

Today's episode is all about trust and responsibility—and how those qualities impact the cost of doing business and the work that's required for any company to be successful. And specifically, it's about something I'm calling the Trust-Profit Paradox. Simply put, you can't build trust and optimize for profit at the same time.

After losing my ish listening to The Verge's Nilay Patel stump Airbnb's Brian Chesky with a question about AI-generated images on the Decoder podcast, I started to think about the responsibility that companies like Airbnb have (or, rather, avoid). From there, my research took me to some truly unexpected places—like into mainstream management theory.

Footnotes:

• "The Pope Francis Puffer Photo Was Real In Our Hearts" by Eileen Cartter on GQ
• "'I can't make products just for 41-year-old tech founders': Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky is taking it back to basics" on Decoder with Nilay Patel (audio & transcript available)
• "The Delusion of Profit" by Peter Drucker in Wall Street Journal
• "Cost of Capital" on the Harvard Business School blog
• "If you're getting ripped off, it's not surprising" featuring Niko Matouschek at Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern
• "The Age of Customer Capitalism" by Roger Martin in Harvard Business Review
• "'Is Substack Notes a Twitter clone?': We asked CEO Chris Best" on Decoder with Nilay Patel

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Work is central to the human experience. It helps us shape our identities, care for those we love, and contribute to our communities. Work can be a source of power and a catalyst for change. Unfortunately, that's not how most of us experience work—even those who work for themselves. Our labor and creative spirit are used to enrich others and maintain the status quo. It's time for an intervention. What Works is a show about rethinking work, business, and leadership for the 21st-century economy. Host Tara McMullin covers money, management, culture, media, philosophy, and more to figure out what's working (and what's not) today. Tara offers a distinctly interdisciplinary approach to deep-dive analysis of how we work and how work shapes us.