Trust is the real balance sheet

The things you can't put on a balance sheet—trust, loyalty—are just as important as the numbers, if not more.

Here is how they get spent. A company figures out it can raise every price by three cents and nobody will notice. Three cents across the whole store is millions, if not billions, on the bottom line. So they do it. And that is heroin for a business: once you start, it becomes part of your P&L, you start relying on it, and that's how prices never stop climbing.

Nobody notices any single three cents. But the trust is draining the whole time, quietly, unmeasured. Guard the thing nobody is counting—it's usually the thing holding everything up.