Page 99 - Roy W. Rice - CEO Material How to Be a Leader in Any Organization-McGraw-Hill (2009)

80 • CEO Material: How to Be a Leader in Any Organization

was disallowed in American companies. This young executive refused it
when offered. Some of his peers didn’t. Eighteen years later, this same
person was one of the three in line for the CEO position. The other two
had taken the money. The young executive who had refused it almost two
decades before got the nod.
Your integrity is remembered a long time.

We have plenty of money to take care of any problems. We’ll never
have enough money to deal with bad press from low integrity.

Questionable character is the mark of death. Executive search
consultants serving all industries will tell you that “companies hire for
skills but fire for character.” If you don’t have unchallengeable ethics,
nothing else you do matters.
There is no win, no advantage, and no victory that is worth even a
blemish on your integrity. Nothing travels faster than a negative word
about you. There’s an expression that was around long before YouTube:
“A lie gets halfway around the world before truth gets its boots on.”
Fortune magazine wrote about GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt, who “stood
before 200 corporate officers and said it would take four things to keep
the company on top. Three of those were predictable—execution,
growth, and great people—and the fourth—which was the one listed at
the top of the list—virtue.”
You have to have a handful of principles, and you stick with them.
That’s what leaders do.

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What you do means little compared to how you do it.

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It’s like a religion or spiritual feeling.

If you are in a company, division, or group that has different ethics
than you, you have four choices depending on your level of influence:

1. Get out.
2. Change the system.