and on his release, he vowed to turn his life around. He created the Choices Foundation, which supports ethics education for young people and awards scholarships to children whose parents are incarcerated. He now is the chief operating officer of a national company based in South Carolina and has a busy schedule as an ethics speaker. He begins his talks in an orange jumpsuit and handcuffs, which make an impression that’s hard to forget.
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that “there are no second acts in American lives,” but Chuck Gallagher transformed the poor choices he made in the first act of his life into an opportunity to prevent others from doing the same. Incidents like the one Chuck experienced at the firing range drive home how devastating the consequences of dishonesty can be.
“Not being admitted to a firing range didn’t mean a lot to me,” Chuck said, “but it did illustrate two important points for my son. First, it showed him that today I am willing to be honest, even though the consequences may be less than pleasant. Second, there are unintended consequences to your actions, and you cannot escape those. Both of those were good things for my son to experience so that he can remain conscious about the choices that he might make and what the consequences might be.”
One Strike and You’re Out
Many years ago I had the privilege of taking a weeklong seminar in leadership at the Gallup Institute in Lincoln, Nebraska. Donald O. Clifton was the institute’s president (you’re probably familiar with his protégés Tom Rath, author of Strengthsfinder 2.0, and Marcus Buckingham, coauthor of First, Break All the Rules), and I’ll never forget what Don said about how the organization deals with employees who have done something dishonest, like fudging data in a poll: “They’re fired. Immediately.”
“Even if it’s just a single offense?” I asked him.
“That’s right. Because people have to trust that our surveys and polls are conducted with integrity. Otherwise our product is meaningless.”
I asked Alan Murray, editor of Fortune magazine and former president of another esteemed polling organization, the Pew Research Center, if he thought Don’s policy was too harsh. He didn’t think so. “The Pew Center sees its greatest asset as the trust that people have in the information the center provides. So anything that has the potential to damage that public trust is an existential threat to the center’s work. Trustworthiness is the core of the Pew brand, and the same was true at the Wall Street Journal,” where Alan used to be managing editor.
The advertising legend Walter Landor once said that “a brand is a promise.” The logo of one of your favorite companies is more than just a cool graphic. The company is essentially saying to you, “You can continue to buy this service or product with confidence that we stand behind what we sell. And if we fail you in some way, we’ll make it right.” Dishonesty at any level of the company threatens that implied promise.
“I’m privileged to have worked for several great brands, and when you think about what makes brands powerful, it’s all about trust,” Alan Murray added. “The public has a certain understanding that what they’re getting when they see that brand is something they can count on and rely on to a higher degree than what they might find elsewhere. I see maintaining the public’s trust as my highest purpose.”
A company’s power, influence, and integrity are a direct function of the honesty of its employees.
Obstacles to Honesty
If honesty is so important and confers so many benefits, why don’t we see more examples of it? It’s because lying can be beneficial in both the short and long term.
Success through Dishonesty
A young man named David had dreams of making it big in the entertainment business, so he did what a lot of enterprising people in his position do: he got a job in the mail room of the William Morris talent agency. On his application he wrote that he had been a production assistant for a popular TV show (true) and had graduated from UCLA (false). When a fellow worker in the mailroom got fired for having lied on his application about where he’d gone to school, David got nervous. The agency apparently was fact-checking what their employees stated about their histories. What could he do to prevent his lie from being discovered?
For the next six months, David was the first one to show up at work, and he went through every piece of mail the business received. When the dreaded letter from the university finally arrived, David steamed it open and replaced it with a phony letter confirming his graduation. No one was the wiser.
David’s story tells us that starting off your career by committing a felony (mail fraud) can be the first step to becoming wildly successful. That’s because the David of this story is David Geffen, one of the richest men in the country. He launched the careers of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young; Joni Mitchell; Linda Ronstadt; Donna Summer; and the Eagles. He produced Cats, one of the longest-running Broadway musicals in history, and together with Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg, he created the film studio Dreamworks SKG.
When David tells the story of how his career began, he does so with no sense of regret or remorse, and the PBS documentary in which this story appears, Inventing David Geffen, uses sprightly music on the soundtrack to accompany the tale. The message is clear: the lie that David told to get his foot in the door and the lengths to which he went to remain employed are commendable, even virtuous.
The end justifies the means, right? If David hadn’t lied on his job application, wouldn’t we have been deprived of some of the best entertainment of the past fifty years?
I don’t buy it. This is a man, after all, who concocted a clever scheme to prevent the truth from coming out and worked hard to pull off the ruse. Someone with that level of dedication would have eventually found a way to succeed in Hollywood and New York without being dishonest.
But David Geffen did lie, he did become successful, and it’s all too easy for the takeaway message to be, “I did it. So can you.” When even a staid institution like PBS valorizes behavior like David’s, such conduct becomes an example for enterprising young people to follow. David’s story is but one of many in which dishonorable behavior leads to fame and fortune. They serve as a Rorschach test for character, and savvy employers might even find a way to use them as such.
Lying to Save Money
Last year, I needed some help with a vexing computer problem, so I placed a help-wanted ad on Craigslist. I’ve generally had good experiences with the people I’ve hired this way, so I had no reason to think this time would be any different. Of the dozens of responses I got, one stood out. A fellow I’ll call Conrad wrote an impressive email overflowing with details about how he could fix the issues I faced and why he was the best candidate for the job. The letter was also unusual for being free of spelling errors and poor grammar. Here’s a guy who not only had expertise in IT — he could write well too! I wrote him back and asked what he would charge for his services.
That’s when he lost the gig. He responded, “You can pay me $45/hour by check or $35/hour in cash.” It took me a moment to see what was going on. (Call me slow on the uptake; maybe you figured it out right away.) I could leave a paper trail for the IRS by paying him one fee, or I could help Conrad avoid paying taxes on his income.
I told Conrad I wouldn’t be needing his services, and he was genuinely perplexed. “I thought I’d be doing you a favor,” he replied. But aside from the inherent dishonesty of Conrad’s proposal itself, it made me ask, if he’s willing to cheat the IRS to do a job, what other corners would he cut?
As the title of Cheri Huber’s book has it,
