Walking the walk

Integrity. It’s a great word that can mean different things to different people. It is often used interchangeably with “honesty”.  However, the best definition I have heard is: Honesty is making your words consistent with reality and integrity is making your actions consistent with your words.  That is, doing what you say. And the test of true integrity is overcoming whatever temptation and doing it even when nobody is looking.

For example, every month we produce a book of operating statements for each division that shows detail financial and operating results.  In addition, it contains key operating statistics such as customer counts, sales per customer, pieces per transaction, etc.  All in all, these reports show how we are doing, where we’re succeeding and where we are falling short.  It’s the kind of information that our competitors would love to have about us so we are careful to keep them from getting it.

So imagine our former CEO, Dan Jorndt’s, surprise when one of our folks walked into his office one Friday afternoon with Wal-Mart’s book of detailed operating statements and placed it on the corner of his desk.  The book had been left behind on a flight to Chicago and our person had stumbled across it and recognized what it was.  What an opportunity to get an inside look at our fiercest competitor!  We could get our finance and operations analysts to tear into it to learn chapter and verse about Wal-Mart and none would be the wiser.

I wonder what must have been running through his mind looking at the unopened book sitting on his desk.  I don’t know if he thought about it at all because it was still sitting there as he turned out the lights in his office at the end of the day and headed home for the weekend.  But I know he must have thought about it over the weekend because he dealt with it the first thing when he came in Monday morning.

He prepared a short note and slipped it along with the book into an envelope and gave it to his assistant to forward on.  The note was addressed David Glass, CEO of Wal-Mart. It read: “One of our folks found this. We didn’t peek.”