Integrity: the Backbone of All Business

There has always been deceit in the world, at least as long as man has been in it.  We think of names in recent times that have stirred the economy because of such darkness, such as Enron and Bernie Madoff; and we think of jail time and people who suffered because they lost everything.

The price of iniquity is suffering.  It is an age old tale.

A Hero

But there is a hero to this story.  It is what binds us and holds us together as a society: integrity.  The world’s governments are founded on it.  Of course there are wrongdoings across all of them, but what keeps us all safe at the end of the day is that most people hold onto their duty.

Economy

The economy is much the same.  I buy something and expect services to be rendered.  We, as an agency, work for a company and expect to get paid.  We hire a consultant and they expect payment.  Of course, these things are upheld by law, but even the law is upheld by fallible people bound by duty.

Integrity makes the world go round.

Leadership

It’s these days that we thank God for good business men and women and good leaders who set forth statutes and principles of business based on what is right and just; and we trust them when we see they live up to that.  We look for justice in our work: to be paid a fair wage for the work put in, and in turn, we put in a great deal of effort to our work and strive to do an even better job.

Work Ethic

Integrity makes us work hard all the time.  Integrity makes me keep track of every minute I spend working, lets me know when I need to work late to make up time, and when I need to bust my bum to beat an important deadline.

Losing Something Else

There is nothing replaceable about it.  If you lose it, there is no going forward without first working hard to get it back.

They say integrity is defined as "who you are when no one's looking."  It can also be when someone's looking and you don't realize it.  This post could monotonously go on forever, but I’ll end with a story about just that.

I was a seminarian once, for seven years actually.  I lived in Dublin for two of those years.  I remember one afternoon there watching a few seminarians older than I talking to each other about getting a car that afternoon to run some errands.  You needed to ask to get a car.

One of them was more of a “ask forgiveness later” type, while the other was “the good one.”  I remember the first one saying to the group: “If you don’t just take them [the car keys], you’ll lose them.”

And the other seminarian said something I will never forget, and it has always had a profound impact on my life.

“But if you just take them,” he said, “You will lose something else.”

And every day since then, I have tried not to lose that.