Columnist Donald J. Myers, a retired U.S. Marine Corps colonel, bemoans the lack of integrity so prevalent today, in and out of the military.

The military goes to extreme lengths to develop integrity because, unlike the civilian world, a lack of integrity in the military costs lives — not just money.

I would argue that the excessive lack of integrity in the corporate world has also cost lives; the thousands whose lives were destroyed by Enron and the recent banking debacle, among others, cost lives and, although most are still walking, they are definitely wounded, some mortally.

The last couple of years media has been trumpeting the importance of leadership integrity and various surveys of global executives confirmed its importance.

But that was then and this is now.

Fast Company cites a new study by IBM—

For CEOs, creativity is now the most important leadership quality for success in business, outweighing even integrity and global thinking… The study is the largest known sample of one-on-one CEO interviews, with over 1,500 corporate heads and public sector leaders across 60 nations and 33 industries polled on what drives them in managing their companies in today’s world.

Here’s how the numbers broke down—

About 60% of CEOs polled cited creativity as the most important leadership quality, compared with 52% for integrity and 35% for global thinking.

(Yes, I realize that totals 147%, but it’s IBM…)

I have no argument with creativity, after all creativity gave us Avatar, iPods and Viagra, but it also gave us CDMs and CDOs.

This points up how important it is for leaders to practice integrity as they embrace creativity.

Image credit: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/963443

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 3rd, 2010 at 1:15 am and is filed under Business info, Leadership's Future. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Tags: cheating, creativity, Ethics, integrity
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