Sandra J. Sucher is a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School and an internationally recognized trust researcher. The Power of Trust: How Companies Build It, Lose It, Regain It, is her third book. It is based on two decades of research on global companies’ best practices and in the gray areas of business—where responsibilities to investors, customers, employees, and society pull companies and their leaders in different directions. She is on the Edelman Trust Institute advisory board, collaborates with Deloitte on TrustIQ™, a proprietary tool that measures key elements of trust in major corporations and public sector organizations, and collaborates with PwC on their Trust Leadership Institute.

At Harvard, Sandra studies how organizations become trusted and the vital role leaders play in the process. She has authored 110 business cases, technical notes, video interviews, teaching notes, and three books. Her 2019 articles on trust were featured as a “big idea” in HBR.org and her 2018 article, “Layoffs That Don’t Break Your Company,” was selected as a Harvard Business Review “Must Read.” Sandra’s textbooks on ethical leadership, The Moral Leader: Challenges, Insights, and Tools and Teaching The Moral Leader: A Literature-based Leadership Course were called “a ground-breaking approach for education in business ethics.”

Sandra was a business executive for 20 years before joining Harvard. As a senior executive at Fidelity Investments, she measured customer loyalty, redesigned back-office operations, and improved the quality of service. In retailing, she authored the proposal to expand Filene’s Basement from a single-unit business to a national chain. Sandra has served on corporate and nonprofit boards and as Chairwoman of the Better Business Bureau.

Sandra’s research has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Quartz, Business Insider, CNBC, NPR, Marketplace, and in Germany, Latin America, and Japan.

Shalene Gupta is a thought leader on trust and the co-author of “The Power of Trust: How Companies Build It, Lose It, Regain It.” She is currently a research associate at Harvard Business School where she studies how trust operates in organizations and the global companies that have created best practices around trust.

Gupta previously served as an editor at MIT Horizon, an MIT-owned start-up which seeks to advance knowledge within the business community about cutting-edge technologies.

Prior to writing “The Power of Trust,” Gupta was a journalist at Fortune where she covered business and technology, with a focus on the latest developments in big data as well as the intersection of diversity and tech.

She received a Fulbright grant to Malaysia, where she taught English to over 2,000 low-income high school students. There she won a grant from the Department of State to run a leadership seminar for young women teaching them personal development and business skills. Afterward, she wrote a book documenting the history of the Malaysian Fulbright program.

Gupta’s work has appeared in Harvard Business Review, ESPN, Kirkus Reviews, The New Straits Times, The Jakarta Post, and Mint.

She earned a B.A. in writing and psychology from Johns Hopkins, and a M.S. in journalism from Columbia University.