I once worked at a company that had partnered with another company through a joint venture agreement. Through that agreement, on our side, we got exclusive content that was very valuable to our customers and provided meaningful growth to our business. So, there was a lot of incentive to keep that partnership going. But we also had to hit certain deliverables by certain dates, and at one point, it became clear that we were going to miss our deliverable. I received a lot of ideas from colleagues around massaging our numbers so it wouldn’t look like we missed our mark. The term they used was “figure it out.” But what they were suggesting was patently inappropriate and unethical, and I stood up to it. I said that no, we weren’t going to “figure it out,” and that we were better than that.
The other side suspected that our numbers weren’t where they needed to be. And at that point, they wanted out of the partnership, and our missed deliverable would have allowed that. But it wasn’t worth our integrity to go down a road where we lied to our partners. The ends simply didn’t justify the means.
That was hard. There were real consequences to our business because of our decision to do things the right way. But it is always to your benefit to build a reputation on integrity. It attracts others to you, builds trust, and it reduces friction.
In business, we have to balance the missionary and the mercenary—our desire to live by certain values while also making a profit. Often, those things are completely aligned.
