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Integrity Integrity is a word whose meaning has gone through a metamorphosis. As we look back through just a couple of generations and compare the way business was conducted then to today we can see the change in the meaning of the word. I remember clearly as a child in Cuba going to the grocery store to pick up things for dinner and telling the grocer that my grand mother had send me. He would nod and make a note in what I considered to be some type an account book. There was no doubt in that grocers mind that my family would pay that bill. Coming to America and going through a very difficult time as a young immigrant child, often times going without food to eat, I will never forget the speech my dad gave my brother and me over and over again: "Son, you have no control in life of whether you are rich or poor, many things can influence this. Son, you have no control in life, whether you are sick or healthy, or whether you are dead or alive. Son, the only thing you have absolute control of is your word, only you have the power to make your word mean something or not mean anything at all." That repeated lesson one day would propel me to lay in a Panamanian jail dying because of my refusal to give up the only thing I had absolute power over-my word. The World War II generation was defined as a generation where a person's ethics determined his decisions. Today, in our morally relative world we have it backward, our decisions are what define our ethics, therefore, integrity is ethically relative. Where once our word was our bond, and the thought of breaking it would not even cross a person's mind, today a person's word is only as good as the contract we have drawn up to enforce it. In a world where we do what is most convenient and we are constantly looking out for "what is in it for me", our word will fluctuate like the weather. We posit that no one likes a liar, yet as we fail to do what we say we will do we become adamant liars. Integrity is best defined as what we do when no one is looking. I suggest that even when we think no one is looking, in reality He Who created us is ever present, ever watching. As business leaders and leaders of our families we let our word define us as the people we are. Lord when I'm in doubt remind me that a good name is more precious than all I may acquire as we sacrifice that name. Meditation: As you lead your families and empower your children to be our nation's future leaders is integrity a subject that is critically present or ever absent?
Jorge L. Valdes, Ph.D.
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