his verdict: “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. Return to your duty, I have already forgotten everything.”
For a culture to stick, it must reflect the leader’s actual values, not just those he thinks sound inspiring. Because a leader creates culture chiefly by his actions—by example.
Make Ethics Explicit
Every company likes to believe it has integrity, but if you asked its employees you’d hear a different story. The trouble with implementing integrity is that it is an abstract, long-term concept. Will integrity get you an extra deal this quarter? Unlikely. In fact, it may do the opposite. Will it make your product ship a week early? No chance. So why do we care about it?
Integrity, honesty, and decency are long-term cultural investments. Their purpose is not to make the quarter, beat a competitor, or attract a new employee. Their purpose is to create a better place to work and to make the company a better one to do business with in the long run. This value does not come for free. In the short run it may cost you deals, people, and investors, which is why most companies cannot bring themselves to actually, really, enforce it. But as we’ll see, the failure to enforce good conduct often brings modern companies to their knees.
One difficulty in implementing integrity is that it’s a concept without boundaries. You can’t pat yourself on the back for treating your employees ethically if you’re simultaneously lying to your customers, because your employees will pick up on the discrepancy and start lying to each other. The behaviors must be universal; you have to live up to them in every context.
Understanding this, Louverture painstakingly, systematically, and relentlessly moved his slave army to higher and higher levels of conduct. He was not playing a short-term game; he was determined to create an army, and then a country, that people would be proud to be a part of. Because he was determined not just to win the revolution, but to build a great country, he knew he had to take the long view.
Louverture’s new state would be based on personal industry, social morality, public education, religious toleration, free trade, civic pride, and racial equality. He emphasized that attaining these goals would be each person’s responsibility: “Learn, citizens, to appreciate the glory of your new political status. In acquiring the rights that the constitution affords all Frenchman, do not forget the duties it imposes on you.” His instructions to his army were particularly direct: “Do not disappoint me … do not permit the desire for booty to turn you aside … it will be time enough to think of material things when we have driven the enemy from our shores. We are fighting that liberty—the most precious of earthly possessions—may not perish.”
Crucially, Louverture’s ethical instruction was explicit. Often CEOs will be exceptionally explicit about goals such as shipping products, but silent on matters such as obeying the law. This can be fatal. It’s because integrity is often at odds with other goals that it must be clearly and specifically inserted into the culture. If a company expects its people to behave ethically without giving them detailed instructions on what that behavior looks like and how to pursue it, the company will fall far short no matter whom it hires.
This is why Louverture underlined his instructions with strict enforcement. Pamphile de Lacroix, a French general who fought against Louverture, wrote, “Never was a European army subjected to more severe discipline than that observed by Louverture’s troops.” The contrast with the French was stark. As C. L. R. James observed, “The soldier emigres, Dessources and some others, vicomtes, and chevaliers, broke the terms of the amnesty, destroyed cannon and ammunition dumps, killed all the animals, and set plantations on fire. Louverture’s Africans, on the other hand, starving and half-naked, marched into the towns, and such was their discipline that no single act of violence or pillage was committed.”
When Louverture’s own army was starving during its campaign against the British, he nonetheless gave food to destitute local white women. He wrote: “My heart is torn at the fate which has befallen some unhappy whites who have been victims of this business.” The women reported the assistance that they had received from this “astonishing man,” and called the ugly old ex-slave their father. If you stop reading this book and go tell your friends that the slave who led the Haitian Revolution was called “Father” by the white women of the colony, they won’t believe you, because it’s unbelievable. But it’s true. Such is the power of ethics.
By 1801, Louverture’s massive investment in the culture began to pay off. With blacks and mulattoes running the country, cultivation had been restored to two-thirds of its peak level under the French. Integrity proved its worth.
WHAT HAPPENED TO LOUVERTURE?
The end of Louverture’s story is dismaying. After Louverture wrote his constitution in 1801, Napoleon became furious at this display of independence and decided to overthrow him. The following year, Louverture’s second in command, the fierce General Jean-Jacques Dessalines, coordinated a double cross with Napoleon’s top general in Saint-Domingue. Louverture was arrested at a diplomatic meeting and sent by ship to France, where he would spend the brief remainder of his days being badly treated in a French jail. He died of a stroke and pneumonia on April 7, 1803. Meanwhile, Napoleon began restoring slavery throughout the Caribbean. It was this, in great part, that led Dessalines to turn against Napoleon. He united all rebel factions under him, defeated Napoleon’s army, and declared independence in January 1804. He changed the country’s name to Haiti, and later that year had himself proclaimed emperor.
Dessalines completed the revolution that Louverture had spearheaded for so long, but he promptly made two decisions that Louverture would have abhorred: he ordered that most of the French whites in Haiti be put to death and he nationalized all private land, abruptly reversing much of the cultural and economic headway that Louverture had made. Though the French would eventually give Haiti diplomatic recognition in 1825, they would also exact cruel reparations for Dessalines’s shortsighted decisions, forcing Haiti to pay the modern equivalent of $21 billion for France’s loss of its slaves and plantations. These events continue to haunt the country, which remains the poorest in the Western world.
Sad story, but how could it happen? How could Louverture, genius of culture and human nature that he was, not perceive the brewing treachery? In a sense, he was like the Greek hero Oedipus, who solved the riddle of the Sphinx but who couldn’t clearly see those closest to him. Louverture’s optimistic view of human potential blinded him to certain home truths.
Because Louverture believed in the French Revolution and the freedoms it claimed to embody, he saw Napoleon as an enlightened product of the revolution rather than as the racist he was. In one outburst, Napoleon said: “I will not rest until I have torn the epaulettes off every nigger in the colonies.”
Because of Louverture’s loyalty to France, he didn’t declare independence when the French army invaded, which would have united the whole island behind him. He vacillated.
And because Louverture trusted—all too much—that his army would trust him to act for the best, he didn’t grasp that his soldiers were restless about everything from his position on agriculture to his constant efforts to attain a diplomatic solution with France, to his rule against revenge. Louverture did not grasp the emotional power of retribution, whereas Dessalines did.
C. L. R. James put it well: “If Dessalines could see so clearly and simply, it was because the ties that bound this uneducated soldier to French civilization were of the slenderest. He saw what was right under his nose so well because he saw no further. Louverture’s failure was the failure of enlightenment, not darkness.”
Yet though Louverture’s culture proved tragically difficult for his flawed subordinate to live up to,
