Richard Branson is the leading business persons' leading business
person! He is the top, the entrepreneur all would like to emulate, the
manager everyone aspires to copy, and he has a beard! Polls declare
that he is the most respected business leader in the UK. Go on, admit
it, just like me you think Branson is OK. By contrast, just recently on
the whole topic of his suitability to run the National Lottery a couple
of newspapers have been calling to question his integrity. What's it
all about? Can Mr Branson really be doubted? What exactly do they mean?

In the United States we have an ex-president whose entire term of
office was fraught with allegations of impropriety and sleaze, yet
whose domestic record is one of the best of the post-war period. When
the world looks at Clinton the President, it doesn't judge him as a man
who broke the rules by having sex outside his marriage, but rather as a
man who was foolish enough to get caught at it, and then broke public
trust by telling lies. Deep down we half excuse him, and we can
sympathise with the childlike urge to lie when you think you're in
trouble.

There is a problem. In fact there are two problems.

First, in our world we have an artificial divorce between public
integrity in work, government or wherever and private morality in the
bedroom. We say "it doesn't matter what someone's private life is like
just so long as they do their job well!" we say "what they get up to at
home is their affair."

Second, we are not entirely sure whether integrity is about inner truthfulness, or outer goodness.

Of course, in reality these two problems are linked. Take a look in
the dictionary and you discover that integrity has changed its meaning
over the years. In the 15th and 16th centuries integrity referred to
'an unblemished state of original perfection,' 'innocence' or
'sinlessness.' It was essentially a moral concept tied to the Christian
faith. By 1870 the meaning of the word had expanded to include the
definition most of us would understand today - 'wholeness,' 'being
completely integrated within itself,' 'being true to who you really
are.' Today, most of us use 'integrity' to mean something like 'honesty
of character', although this in turn tends to be relative to our own
relationship with them. So a person who is straight with us, even
though they're lying to their partner can have integrity in our eyes;
or a person who we trust as a friend but who lies for a living can be a
person of integrity to us.

Secularism - the banishing of God from society, has made it hard for
public statements of morality to be based on Christian beliefs.
Pluralism has made it still harder for morals based on individual
beliefs to have valid impact the public sphere after all, what I
consider sinful in a Christian tradition may not be sinful to a
traditional Hindu. So our world has redefined public integrity away
from 'sinlessness' to lawfulness, or to adherence with society's
accepted norms of good and bad. Battles to define what constitutes good
and bad are now left to pressure groups and the media as the church has
lost its voice and the government has only Daily Mail morality to
offer.

Private integrity is left to operate by reference to what the
individual believes, here even 'lawfulness' is replaced by
'unimpeachability'. So it is seen as being true to those things which
you happen to believe are right - the pursuit of happiness, the
preservation of the environment, obedience to the law, the well-being
of others, maybe some religious moral code. The problem comes when we
try to get people with their own individual sets of values to
co-operate, and to see eye to eye. The problem is made worse still,
when we try to get people to set public standards of morality based on
their own designer version of private integrity.

So we long for women and men of integrity to run our country, our
businesses, our schools, our hospital trusts, our police forces and
even our churches. At the same time we hope that morality displayed in
the public world, or through the newspapers and soaps will teach
members of our society how to behave. The truth must be that a godless
society will rapidly become a self-orientated society in which
individual survival and fulfilment are the goal.

One survey of senior managers showed overwhelmingly that integrity
is the most sought after personal characteristic in business partners.
The same survey also showed that very few of those managers actually
trusted many of their business partners. The integrity they were
looking for was more than just a public or corporate lawfulness, it was
more than just a self-seeking inner honesty, it was in fact
whole-hearted trustworthiness.

Think about Richard Gere's character in Pretty Woman - he takes over
companies just so that he can hack them to pieces, closing down the
less profitable parts and selling the better parts for a huge profit.
He acts totally within the law, and he is totally true to himself (sees
the world as being up for grabs - so he just grabs it: the car, the
girl, the hotel suite the deal), but few of us like the idea of what
he's doing, it just seems too cut-throat.

In the working world, it has been suggested that the 'best'
organisations are those which are 'value driven' - that is, they have
an accepted code of ethical integrity. This assumes that the
corporation can set up a code of behavioural standards to which every
employee will then adhere, regardless of their own private standards of
integrity.

What has now been shown by research from KPMG is that this just
doesn't work. The survey in fact found that the majority of employees
had a number of reasons for not following the corporate integrity
standards: 50% of the time employees didn't feel sufficiently well
trained to do their job with the integrity required; between 50% and
70% saw that in some circumstances integrity could be an impediment to
their earnings/workloads/ambitions; over 75% said there were times when
they just couldn't be bothered to follow the code; and 22% of
deliberately set out to shaft the company!

The truth must ultimately be that the organisation, like society,
will reflect the values that individuals believe in just as much, if
not more so than the values written into a corporate mission statement
or government bill. Why, well because integrity does have this double
meaning - not only does it refer to upright behaviour but it also
refers to consistency of character. If a person has integrity we should
be able to chop them in half and see the same morally upright qualities
running right the way through them! An organisation or society
comprised of individuals each with their own autonomous and
self-centred codes of 'integrity' will ultimately be shaped by those
individual standards and not vice versa.

What's lacking in integrity is meaning, and for the Christian this
will leave us without clear guidelines on how to work in a pagan world.
It is vital for our safety, and for the sake of our companies,
institutions and society that we recover a true sense of Christian
integrity, and that we work hard at letting this be the core to all our
attitudes, words and actions both at home and at work.