Fail Up (4 page)

CHAPTER 2

CHEATERS
NEVER WIN

I
had to whisper “Amen!”

On September 10, 2010, columnist George Will, economist Paul Krugman, ABC News political director Amy Walter, and I were waiting our turn to go on the air and discuss politics with the host of ABC's
This Week with Christiane Amanpour
.

There was a lot of chatter in the Green Room that day. My attention, however, was diverted to the conversation between Amanpour and the guest who preceded us—French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde.

“You were a former CEO; do you think women have a different way of approaching business or approaching the public sphere?” Amanpour asked the finance minister.

“Yes … I think we inject less libido, less testosterone into the equation,” Lagarde responded. “It helps in the sense that we don't necessarily project our own egos into cutting a deal, making our point across … convincing people, reducing them to a partner that has lost in the process.”

Lagarde admitted to over-generalizing. She said that there are indeed women who operate exactly like men. But, she added, “… I honestly believe that there are a majority of women in such positions that approach power, decisionmaking processes, and other people in business relationships in a slightly different manner.”

Immediately, Lagarde's words took me back to a precarious time when my career could have ended before it even began. As a college student, I made a foolish, potentially disastrous mistake that could have put me behind bars and destroyed my public ambitions forever. It was a woman—a very powerful woman—who resisted the advice of a male subordinate who wanted to crucify me for my recklessness.

This woman of authority, who handled a delicate situation in a “slightly different manner” than a man, profoundly impacted my life. It is because of her, in part, that I rely on the instincts of women. My company was started with a brilliant woman and, to this day, women run the majority of my enterprises. The levels of professional excellence, emotional intelligence, and wisdom they bring into my universe are invaluable.

I don't know why Amanpour seguéd from the topic of European finance to the question about women in power. To me, it was but another divine reminder—a flashback to a lesson learned about benevolence, tough love, the blessings inherent with a second chance, and, most importantly, the value of personal integrity and ethics.

And so, I just had to say “Amen!”

Cheater

The off-campus shooting of Denver Smith on September 12, 1983, rocked the worlds of students and faculty members at Indiana University in Bloomington. Denver—a football star, husband, father to a brand-new baby girl, and my kindhearted friend—was shot in the back four times by local police officers. Police spokesmen told reporters that Smith, 24 at the time, was acting “erratically and deranged.” He was scuffling with officers when they shot him in the back.

This incident was the first encounter that I, a kid from the small town of Kokomo, Indiana, had with what many of us on campus perceived as racism and prejudice. As a sophomore and the highest-ranking Black person in student government, I was often quoted in the media denouncing what had happened to Denver.

The case took its legal route but, in the process, Bloomington Mayor Tomilea Allison assembled a blue-ribbon commission, the Bloomington Community Progress Council. The group was charged with developing an agenda that would advance the city socially, culturally, and economically. It also recommended community outreach efforts that might, hopefully, prevent another high-profile incident like the one that robbed Denver Smith of his life.

Our initial introduction—me, as an angry advocate for police accountability, and Mayor Allison, as the city's top official and defender of all things city-related—was somewhat antagonistic. Still, she took a liking to me and gave me the opportunity to intern for her.

The biggest part of my job was to serve as the mayor's liaison to the prestigious community progress council. Imagine the opportunity: There I was—a 20-year-old pre-law/public policy major with a small office in the mayor's suite. Not only was I studying it at school, I was also helping to shape public policy every day.

It was beyond cool.

Mayor Allison trusted me implicitly, so much so that I was allowed to fill out my own time card. To this day, if you asked what motivated me to start padding my time sheet, I don't know that I can offer an honest answer. It began almost imperceptibly. If I worked six hours, I'd put down eight. If I worked eight, I'd put down ten.

I justified my actions by rationalizing that I wasn't really doing anything
that
bad. They only paid me minimum wage—a meager amount for the huge investment of my time and energy on the mayor's project. Besides, I needed the extra cash. I was the first person on either my mother or father's side of the family to ever go to college. The debate team and trying to keep my grades up dominated my busy schedule. I could not let the lack of money jeopardize my success.
Survival
was the excuse I leaned on to blot everything my parents and my church had taught me about honesty and trust.

The trust the mayor had in me was not shared by other members of her staff. One day, I was told to report to the office of the deputy mayor, a no-nonsense man who wasn't exactly enthralled with the mayor's choice for community liaison.

The deputy mayor laid out undeniable evidence that proved I had been cheating on my time sheets. I was busted. He immediately checked off the procedure he'd recommend to the mayor—notify the police, have me arrested, fire me, and publicly humiliate me for my actions.

What?! Until that moment, I had never connected padding a few hours here and there with the police, being arrested, or going to jail! At first I was just humiliated. I had betrayed everything I had learned in life about “truth, truth, and more truth.” But the more the deputy mayor talked, the quicker my humiliation escalated to fear of going to jail.

I dreaded with all my heart meeting with Mayor Allison the following day. The solemn look in her eyes alone reduced me to Jell-O®.

“Tavis, you have disappointed me. I never expected this from you,” the mayor said. She never expected me to be a “fabricator, a cheater, a thief.” Without hesitating for a response, she added that I wasn't just a “thief,” I was the “worst kind of thief” because I stole “the people's money.”

In my meeting with the deputy mayor, there was humiliation but no emotion. I didn't shed a tear. Mayor Allison had me at “disappointed,” but when she hit me with the cold hard fact that I had stolen from taxpayers, that I had violated the people's trust … well, as my grandfather used to say, “I gave up all kinda water.”

Admonish but Affirm

Mayor Allison, who is white, could have chosen a path taken by so many people of authority with little tolerance for wayward Black youth. She could have had me locked up and forever locked out of a promising career. Instead, she did something most people in her position probably never would have considered. She looked across her desk at a sniffling, broken, and humiliated Black college student and decided to affirm his value.

“Tavis, when I first met you and saw how you articulated and expressed yourself and organized students, I had such high hopes for you,” the mayor began. “No,” she stopped herself, “let me rephrase that. I don't want to say ‘had.' I
have
high hopes for you. I know how successful you can be—and I'm not just talking about what you have to offer Black people. You have so much to offer the American people.”

Wow! Talk about a teachable moment. Here I am thinking I'm on the verge of being arrested, and this woman not only reprimands me but takes the time to affirm me as well.

Fast-forward some 25 years and the mayor's lesson stays with me. When it's necessary to enforce a serious course correction among my employees, I try to affirm them as well. Over and over again, starting with Mayor Allison, I've been reminded that you can correct and even reprimand somebody, but, at the same time, you can also affirm that person. If you are in a position of power, you can also offer a second chance. This simple but powerful act gives the accused a chance to not only learn from the transgression, but it also provides the incentive to never risk losing that respected person's trust again. At least it did for me.

Ignoring the advice of her deputy, Mayor Allison laid out, in specific detail, how I would rectify my situation. She expected me to go over all my time sheets and give her the best estimate of what I stole from the taxpayers.

“I'm trusting that you're going to do it with every bit of honesty you have in your body,” she said. “And when we figure it out, we're going to calculate what it is in hours, and you're going to work off those hours. You're going to give this time back to the city. In essence, by the end of the day, you will not have stolen from the city.”

And that's exactly what I did—calculated those hours to the minute and worked all of them off—and then some. When I paid back the money, there was no patting me on the back. Mayor Allison simply acknowledged that I had lived up to her expectations.

And that was more than good enough for me.

After she described how I would pay the city back, the mayor added a final caveat:

“Tavis, I think you're going to learn a lesson from this.”

She was more than right. I learned a life lesson I'll never forget.

A Culture of Cheaters

Today's headlines are filled with news of cheaters: Former investment adviser Bernard “Bernie” Madoff, sentenced to 150 years in prison for bilking investors out of billions through a massive Ponzi scheme; the collective black eye Major League Baseball received after numerous media reports exposed the extent of performance-enhancing steroid use; city officials in Bell, a small southern California town, arrested and charged with misappropriating more than $5 million in city money for their personal use.

One of the reasons I'm such a stickler for accountability is because I know what it means to violate the public trust. Although I list theft of taxpayer money among the most egregious offenses, I recognize the common denominator among ripping off voters, stealing from investors, and using steroids—they are all acts of betrayal. Just as I had disappointed Mayor Allison and the citizens of Bloomington, these individuals betrayed dozens, hundreds, even thousands who trusted and respected them.

These examples are but a few high-profile cases of cheating. Society is filled with so many other more pedestrian examples: executives who fudge their educational credentials or work records on résumés just to appear more experienced and successful; students who plagiarize work from the Internet for better grades; employees who play computer games or chat online or on cell phones while on the company's dime.

We rationalize these acts, tell ourselves it's a temporary means to an end, or it's really no big deal. In actuality, it is. Be it padding our résumés or time sheets, using company computers for personal reasons, or stealing pens or paper towels from work, it reinforces a culture of disrespect and destroys the meaning of personal integrity.

I remember a Slate.com article I read in 2002 about a whole slew of executives caught that year lying about their educational achievements. These men represented companies like Bausch & Lomb, Veritas Software, and Salomon Smith Barney. According to William Baker, a contributor for the CBS Interactive Business Network, “Stretching in résumés—fiddling with dates of employment to hide long layoffs; inflating the magnitude of your job responsibilities—is prevalent. A common figure thrown about in studies and by human resources professionals is that 40 percent of résumés are not exactly on the level.”

What does all this mean? Well, it means “the little white lies”—the fudging and skimming and skirting of responsibilities—are now part of our work culture. It means there are thousands, maybe millions, of workers and executives out there paralyzed with fear, afraid their secrets—large or small—will be exposed or their careers will be ruined. It means we live in a society dominated by cheaters.

My career started on the inside of the body politic working as a public servant. Now, I'm on the outside but still working for the public—with public TV and radio programs. In college, I learned to regard the public's trust and its money seriously. In media, it's the same; nothing is more valuable or sacred than the public trust. Whether I'm on TV or radio, delivering a speech, or conducting an interview—integrity is as important to me now as it was when Mayor Allison taught me that tough-love lesson in integrity years ago. From that day forward, I vowed never to disregard, misuse, or violate the public's trust.

Likewise, wherever you work, whatever you do, remember: Integrity and trust are so terribly important—not only for your company, but for you, your family, and our society as well.