Canada on Corporate Leadership and Ethics
“One of the real challenges for this next generation of leaders is going to be understanding that a lot of what looks successful today, we recognize five or six years from now was really not successful. It was immoral, unethical, or sometimes just downright illegal. The people who are celebrated today for being big geniuses are often the same people we read about as they’re on their way to jail or being disgraced in their industry. You wonder, how does that happen? I think there have been some very common threads in the failures that we’ve seen in the for-profit and not-for-profit sector.
1. Ethics and morality. If you always ask yourself, ‘am I violating what I consider to be ethical and moral?’ in any transaction, it keeps you from making decisions that may lead to short-term payoff, a larger check, a larger bonus, may get a great newspaper article, but those things usually end up costing you much more than you ever made.
2. Wanting to be the richest or the most famous is often a course for destruction and doom in any industry because you’re not doing it for the right reason. If you start down that road, it’s a slippery slope. There’s no stopping the erosion of our values when it’s all about selfish, personal gain. The people I’ve run into who are most successful on Wall Street loved the business before they were ever making money.
You need to make money in America. There’s nothing wrong with even wanting to make money. It just shouldn’t be the primary reason that you go into any career or any business.”
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