"High Performance with High Integrity"
In a new book, High Performance with High Integrity, Ben Heineman argues that contemporary corporations must couple high performance with high integrity, lest they face legal and ethical catastrophes. He writes that CEOs must drive eight core integrity principles and associated practices deep into business operations, thereby allowing companies to achieve affirmative benefits inside the company, in the marketplace, and in the broader society.
In an interview with Bloomberg.com, Heineman explained how he defines corporate integrity.
"Integrity has three elements. First, robust adherence to the spirit and letter of formal rules, legal and financial. Second, voluntary adoption of global ethical standards that bind the company and its employees to act in its enlightened self-interest. And, third, employee commitment to the core values of honesty, candor, fairness, reliability and trustworthiness -- values which infuse the creation and delivery of products and services and which guide internal and external relations."
In its review, Management Today called the book a "compelling thesis." Ben Heineman, Jr. is a distinguished senior fellow at Harvard Law School’s Program on the Legal Profession and former Senior Vice President-General Counsel of GE.