Integral for Integrity

Two incidents happened last week that turned me back to a moral science lesson learnt as a kid and reinforced through years of professional experience.

1st is our interactions (and research) with several bankers and investors. On our asking them what’s the first thing they look for in a public offer. An absolute consensus was that they looked for integrity or the lack of it. The other incident was that of an employee committing petty fraud for personal gains (to be obviously caught red-handed later).

As I reminisce on our time at OfBusiness and my broader professional life, I/we feel I/we have been lucky to have worked with men and women for whom integrity is almost as important as breathing. And we have been good at choosing them upfront, too, as OFBians. As per me, in our interactions, here’s what we look for (neither exhaustive nor prescriptive
and hence not foolproof either).

1. They hang around with people of integrity. Generally, they flock together.
2. Upbringings also help. People who are academically, professionally qualified. People from pious backgrounds. Sometimes lesser privileged backgrounds. People who have risen generally know the value of it.
3. They generally have some or many of the other qualities that are adjacent: honesty, diligence, sincerity, modesty.
4. They generally listen a lot. For the world teaches you all around that integrity is the most important quality.
5. They are vulnerable; they’d have failed. And they’d talk about it. Openly, mostly unaided.

And often, if they don’t have it, they give you signs of it. It’s when you ignore those signs due to your own biases that you are trapped. While if we surround yourselves with integrity, we get sound sleep and the energy to run for a better tomorrow.

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