Lets have another round on personal Integrity!

Its legal! So what do you think when you hear this. It means that the laws of the land have said it is ok to do so or the laws dont have any explicit opinion about it, hence its legal.

Think about it. Where do the laws come from? They definitely do not originate from human nature, otherwise we would not go about breaking so many of them on a regular basis. These are created by people based on their judgement about right or wrong at the time of framing the law.

Now this does not mean that the law is all encompassing. In fact laws are created when people find ways to do things which are not right but the law at that time did not object to it. Think about hoarding. Inherently it means that you are utilizing your resources to stimulate market demand without exerting direct compulsion. This would have been perfectly fine if you were not dealing with food.

My point is that even if the basic values of a person are in the right place, he cannot always depend on the legality of a situation and decide accordingly. He may end up violating his values without even knowing about it, unless some one explicitly points out to him. So it is necessary that you question your own move and be comfortable with it personally, cause if you seek solace or justification externally, you probably will twist the message to suit your frame.

These thoughts are not mine. They are credited to my professor, Dr. Mark Kamstra from the Financial management class at Schulich. I am really glad that they have shaped my thoughts in this manner and the experience has compelled me to pen my thoughts down...

Integrity - by Michael Jensen

I attended a talk on "Putting integrity into Finance - A positive Approach" by michael jensen on the 17th of September 2010 at Schulich School of Business and was propelled to share the ideas discussed.(http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=876312). Michael had a very interesting way of defining Integrity which was void of morality or ethics.

Drawing from the field of ontology he said that integrity is such a basic quality of a being that it cannot be termed as good or bad. An entity has integrity when it is whole and complete. For organizations to have integrity it is important that the design, the implementation and the use of the organization - all three are carried out in a manner which was intended and planned for.

He goes on to further say, that integrity can be maintained in two ways :
A. When the person (or organization) honors his promise in timely fashion.
B. If he is not able to honor the promise, then inform the other party well in time and be ready to accept consequences. There have been numerous cases where companies have gained customer loyalty at times of service failures just by ensuring that the company does everything in their power to amend their shortcoming.

Integrity comes when a person follows the rules and abides by the law of the land. Interestingly, integrity can also be maintained if a person chooses to not follow the rules but let everybody else around him know of his intention of not following them. He should accept all consequences openly and not have anything to hide. A shining example in this regard is Mahatma Gandhi who openly defied the government with his non-cooperation movement and accepted all the hardships.

Some of the interesting analogies he drew were :
1. Integrity compared to spokes of a bicycle : If some of the spokes of the bike are missing and we keep on adding weight onto it then the bike would eventually give in and fail.
2. Integrity as compared to gravity : Like integrity, gravity is neither good nor bad, it just is. Gravity keeps the atmosphere together or it is instrumental in causing death when a person walks off from the top of a building.

These ideas seemed revolutionary to me when I heard them.. I know I have been able to convey only a fraction of the enthusiasm I had when I attended the seminar itself but I would love to hear thoughts of people around this.