Integrity and Social Capital

Integrity means, oneness or being homogeneous. When building a staircase, an engineer will be concerned about the integrity of the steel used to support the structure. This is the same definition I use for personal integrity. Instead of looking at your physical structure, look at your thoughts, words and actions. Only you know what your thoughts are, thus you are the only one that can really evaluate your integrity. Of course it is easy for others to see if your words and actions do not match. It sounds obvious, but we all have had times when our thoughts did not align with our words.

Usually, when we think of marketing, we think of the highway billboard, something designed to give us some message. This is what I call external marketing. Telling the world about who you are and what you stand for. There is also internal marketing. This is where you tell your employees who you are as a company, and what you stand for. When Steve Jobs does a big conference and speaks of all the great innovations and the things to come, he is certainly speaking to his employees as much as he’s speaking to the public. It is every bit as important to market internally as it is to market externally. If your sales people and product producers are not on the same page as you are, the structural integrity of your company will suffer, just as a staircase, or an individual’s character. Like with many things, many people never stop and think about what they are thinking about. And thus many companies never stop and think about the message they are sending to their employees and thus the owner doesn’t get a chance to know what the company is thinking. Just as it is up to you to guide what you think, it is up to you to guide how the company thinks as well.