Page 35 - The Bible On Leadership

22 THE BIBLE ON LEADERSHIP

able to explain that decision in the same way to anybody who asks, be
it our spouse, our business partner, an employee, a creditor, or a cus-
tomer. I have to sleep at night.’’ 21
James Burke, former CEO of Johnson & Johnson, made many of his
biggest decisions based on Johnson & Johnson’s famed credo, which has
been in effect for almost six decades. The basic message of the credo is:
Be straight with your employees, your customers, the public, and your-
self, and you will achieve long-term success. During the Tylenol crisis,
the company made an ethical decision that before risking even one
more life to potential cyanide poisoning, economic sacrifice was neces-
sary. Large amounts of product were destroyed, but Johnson & Johnson
was not.
No one could ever accuse Jack Welch of being ‘‘soft-headed.’’ But
even Welch, the ultimate hardball player, believed that ‘‘excellence and
competition are totally compatible with honesty and integrity. The A
student, the four-minute miler, the high-jump world record holder—all
strong winners—can achieve those results without resorting to cheat-
ing. People who cheat are simply weak.’’
Welch was taken aback when almost half of a group of business stu-
dents, in a hypothetical case situation, said they would deposit $1 mil-
lion in a Swiss bank account to an agent in order to book a $50 million
order. ‘‘I was shocked! Shocked! I told the students someone was teach-
ing them the wrong things. This was not one of those cases where you
had to interpret the law; this was a simple bribery case.’’ 22
Bill O’Brien, president of Hanover Insurance, declared that though
‘‘once the morals of the workplace seemed to require a level of morality
in business that was lower than in other activities, we believe there is
no fundamental tradeoff between the higher virtues of life and eco-
nomic success. We believe we can have both. In fact, we believe that,
over the long term, the more we practice the higher virtues of life, the
more economic success we will have.’’ At the time he spoke, the com-
23
pany was in the top quartile of its industry and had grown 50 percent
faster than the industry standard over a ten-year period.
Honesty and integrity are not easy traits to implement over the long-
term, but they’ve stood the test of time—over 5,000 years if we want