Recent Integrity Commentaries

Featured image for “What’s the Goal?”
What’s the Goal?
Last Friday’s post talked about business ethics. One reader asked about a potential conflict between the needs of a shareholder to make money versus needing to do right by employees. “Can you be equally ethical to both? Is it ethical for a company to deprive shareholders of additional money in order to maintain an ethical working environment?” Creating and maintaining...
Read More
May 25, 2012
Featured image for “Ways to Improve”
Ways to Improve
Everyone’s looking for ways to improve. (Well, maybe not everyone, but most people I know.) With all the ethics scandals in the news lately, I thought I would take this opportunity to offer some ways you can improve your ethical integrity. To begin with – Ethics – writer, philosopher Ayn Rand defines ethics as “a code of values which guide our...
Read More
May 16, 2012
Featured image for “What Do You Stand For?”
What Do You Stand For?
AMC’s Mad Men is rife with ethical issues. In creator Matthew Weiner’s ‘60s universe of advertising ad men and women, Joan Holloway is one of the most captivating and contradictory characters on the show. Originally seen as a Marilyn Monroe type, Joan has been quick to dispel any notion of air-headedness. In 2008, the Chicago Tribune wrote that “Joan certainly can be brusque with...
Read More
June 27, 2011
Featured image for “Building Trust and Confidence”
Building Trust and Confidence
Earlier this week I gave a keynote address at a conference of security professionals – a group whose integrity is embedded in their DNA. “This Code of Conduct and Ethics signifies a voluntary assumption by members of the obligation of self-discipline above and beyond the requirements of the law… members intend to maintain a high level of ethics and professional...
Read More
April 22, 2011
Featured image for “Philadelphia Story”
Philadelphia Story
Several years ago I was in Philadelphia speaking to about 400 administrators and trustees of a large teacher pension fund. At the end of the talk, I left the group with a story that asks, in essence, if we all had to make decisions with our families looking over our shoulder, would we be comfortable, proudeven, of the decisions we make?...
Read More
April 20, 2011
Featured image for “Educating Jim”
Educating Jim
“Why do we study ethics? What does it mean to be a person of character, integrity, honor?” Those were the questions I posed to students at the beginning of a week-long class at the New Hampshire Technical Institute on ethics. “Most people want to do the right thing,” I said. “They want to be worthy of the respect and admiration...
Read More
January 26, 2011
Featured image for “Nurses Do it Again!”
Nurses Do it Again!
For nine straight years, nurses continue to rank the highest in the Gallup organization’s annual Honesty and Ethics survey. They would have scored first in the last eleven years if it wasn’t for firefighters snagging the top spot in 2001. The survey results were released on December 3 of this year by the Gallup organization that has been running the annual survey since 1976. “Eighty-one...
Read More
December 10, 2010
Featured image for “Sparky”
Sparky
“Sparky”… now that’s a name that could only be tagged to a baseball player, except he didn’t play the game, he managed it. Anderson died last week at 76. “Sparky was, by far, the best manager I ever played for,” saidCincinnati Reds Pete Rose. “He understood people better than anyone I ever met. His players loved him, he loved his players,...
Read More
November 8, 2010
Featured image for “Not Good Enough”
Not Good Enough
Is there a national championship collegiate athletic program anywhere in the country that can truthfully say all of its recruiting was done entirely within the official guidelines? That’s how Roger Ebert began his review of the 1994 Nick Nolte film Blue Chips. It’s a question that inhabits practically every frame of the film; a film that, sadly, bears too much resemblance...
Read More
June 14, 2010
Featured image for “Curb Your Enthusiasm”
Curb Your Enthusiasm
Based on just the past 18 months of ethics-related scandals, it’s safe to say that trust is difficult to come by in corporate and political leaders, not to mention the media. With the passing of Walter Cronkite, “the most trusted man in America,” the Washington Post asked readers to submit their own nominees for trustworthiness.  Here are a few: Oprah Winfrey, “because...
Read More
August 5, 2009