If you don’t have integrity, you have nothing. You can’t buy it. You can have all the money in the world, but if you are not a moral and ethical person, you really have nothing. – Henry Kravis
When I started Capital TechSearch, the dot-coms had crashed and the world witnessed some of the most stunning instances of corporate fraud ever recorded. We saw WorldCom and Enron and the numerous others like them crash because of their leaders’ greed and lack of integrity. And then last year we watched it all happen again – this time, because of pure and stupidity – as major banks crumbled and innocent bystanders lost millions because of it.
If you have no morals or ethics, you have no business being a business owner. The problem with that concept is that you’ll come across very few people who will admit that they have no morals or ethics. In fact, most people will readily cast themselves as individuals with high moral regard (“Moregard”? Did I just create a word?).
This is why your reputation from third party sources is the biggest selling point you have for yourself. It’s why social-networking Web sites such as LinkedIn offer recommendations from others. Without your reputation and referrals from others, you may still have a way to make lots of money, but if no one can look at you as a genuinely good person, well then – as business financier Henry Kravis says – you’d still have nothing.
And should you “Pull an Enron” on any level, large or small…if you lose your integrity, there’s no “Lost and Found” for that. It’s one of the hardest things to get back.
