From a recent posting: I had posted on the earlier topic and I'm still clinging to the same beliefs. We have the freedom to choose whether to act with integrity or not. It seems like in more cases, that leads to career damage. As Bob mentioned, in a few rare companies, that quality may be prized. I chose integrity. I was raised on old-fashioned values: work hard, be honest, help people. No doubt this path has st From a recent posting:I had posted on the earlier topic and I’m still clinging to the same beliefs.We have the freedom to choose whether to act with integrity or not. It seems like in more cases, that leads to career damage. As Bob mentioned, in a few rare companies, that quality may be prized. I chose integrity. I was raised on old-fashioned values: work hard, be honest, help people. No doubt this path has stifled my career, but most times I don’t regret that decision. At least I can sleep at night.If your organization is integrity-challenged, then you can continue to act with integrity, but as most have found, the odds are slim (but not zero) that the organization will change its ways. Some may choose that path, others may opt to find companies where integrity is valued, which is where career networking comes into play. Doubt it would be easy to determine in an interview whether a company *truly* values integrity or gives it lip service.But if your network is wide enough and your contacts can give you the straight story of what its like in their companies, maybe sooner or later you’ll find the rare company where integrity is the dominant philosophy. And then jump on the first opportunity you can to land a job with that organization. Bob says: Integrity is good. Integrity is important. I just wish it was easier to define. For example, while honesty is supposed to be a sign of integrity, telling a co-worker, “You’re ugly and your mother doesn’t love you,” isn’t, to me, a sign of integrity no matter how accurate the statement. Then there’s hard work. Given a choice between someone who’s energetic and someone else who’s creatively lazy, I’ll generally take the lazy one, which is to say, hard workers often do things the hard way, never understanding that the hard way is usually the error-prone way as well.Hard workers take boilerplate letters and, one-at-a-time, copy in names and addresses by hand. It’s the creatively lazy workers who take the time to learn mail-merge. When they do, they’ll get the same mailing out in a tenth the time and with a tiny fraction of the errors. If they then take a long lunch while their hard-working colleague is still cutting and pasting … I don’t have a problem with that.Integrity is one of those words that’s easy to say, hard to define, and even harder to define in others, who just might be making the best of a bad situation, about which you and I know nothing at all. So for what it’s worth, here’s my personal definition: Integrity means choosing a worthwhile goal and pursuing it while doing as little damage along the way as possible, and never more damage than the goal itself is worth.And for those who don’t think the ends can justify the means, I’ll ask: What else justifies any action? Because if you think the actions themselves justify anything …I think you’re ugly and your mother doesn’t love you. – Bob ——– Technology Industry