Cardinal Systems had been frightened for eighteen months, and frightened people make careful, defensive, small decisions, and all of that had to be undone slowly, by showing them — not telling them, showing them — that the ground was solid now.

You cannot command people to stop being afraid.

Fear is not persuaded by memos.

It is persuaded only by evidence, accumulated slowly, that the thing it is braced against is not going to happen again, and so I spent that first year in the patient business of supplying evidence — a restored raise that actually appeared in a paycheck, a promise kept on a Tuesday that no one would have noticed me breaking, a hundred small proofs that the new ground would bear weight.

Trust, once broken in an organization, comes back the way it comes back in a person: shyly, and only to those who keep showing up.