Like so many, I stayed up late to watch the vote count about whether the United Kingdom should remain part of the European Union (“EU”). With a margin of about 4% or 1.3 million people, “Leave” won the day, despite financial market trades that reflected an expectation to stay. Whatever your preferred outcome, it was certainly exciting to watch “people power” in action and learn more about our neighbors overseas.

No doubt there will be post-mortems by economists, political pundits and pollsters about what led to the British exit from the EU or “BREXIT.” Already, U.S. broadcasters in these early hours of June 24 are drawing inferences about what this historic decision might mean for our upcoming presidential election.

What caught my attention was a Financial Times column by its associate editor Michael Skapinker. In “Two nations but only one trusts business and its allies” (June 22, 2016), he describes opinion poll numbers that reflect a seriously low level of trust in what business executives, economists and those at the International Monetary Fund or the Bank of England have to say. His view is that “None of this is surprising,” due in part to banking and corporate scandals that have eroded Joe Everyman’s confidence in various institutions. What he did find “riveting” was a clear dichotomy between trust levels and how respondents planned to vote on the June 23 referendum. “Remainers” declared a high level of trust. The opposite was true for those in the other camp. Even academics who had little to do with the BREXIT discussion were given short shrift by the “leavers.” His major concern is that doubters don’t engage and are “far harder to win over” when asserting that businesses should not be heavily reined in through regulation.

There is a lot to be said about this concept of broken trust and what commercial and political organizations need to do to assuage fears of those who have been either spurned or were non-believers from the start. This is especially apropos when bad news can travel around the world in seconds, a grumpy customer can influence thousands of people with a single Tweet and a protester needs only a poster board and a magic marker to convey an impactful message. The good news is that there is so much that can be done to showcase leadership and integrity when it exists and there is no time like now to act.