Integrity, by Nancy Chek

Integrity appears as a corporate value under the “About Us” section of many companies’ web sites. It appears so much, in fact, that I don’t pay attention to it any more unless more detail follows.

At Dorrier Underwood, we use integrity in Webster’s second sense: “The quality or state of being complete or undivided: entireness, completeness.”

The second definition takes the sting of moral righteousness out of the word, although in some instances I feel a strong pull to put it back in. The Washington Post has a story, for instance, about 200 former Samsung workers, most from one particular plant, who developed rare and sometimes fatal illnesses.  

Samsung has Integrity as one of its “core values”: Operating in an ethical way is the foundation of our business. Everything we do is guided by a moral compass that ensures fairness, respect for all stakeholders and complete transparency.

All this is now in the news because, after seven years of complaints, Samsung has now offered compensation. And pointedly refused to accept responsibility. Apparently it’s hard to say why a bunch of people suddenly develop brain tumors or leukemia or multiple sclerosis. South Korea’s workplace compensation bureau says it can’t find medical correlations for some cases. What’s a company to do?

Something similar to what Johnson & Johnson did in 1982 to handle the Tylenol poisoning:  recall 31 million bottles of capsules and replace them with tablets for free. Tylenol would have been out of business if they had not—if they had said, with some justification: “It’s not our fault some crazy person laced capsules with cyanide. We can’t be responsible for every wacko.”

Marketers at the time, in fact,  predicted the swift decline of Tylenol (market share plunged from 37 to seven percent). Instead, its stock price recovered within two months, and market share returned almost to normal within a year. Johnson & Johnson’s acting decisively and generously--the cost of recalls and relaunches cost well over $100 million--became news.

But there was no way Johnson & Johnson could have known that in advance. Before they did it, before they cleaned up a mess that was not of their making, no one recalled anything.  Today, a company dragging its feet now looks disappointingly mean and uncaring.

If we take integrity to mean “whole and complete,” we can see that Johnson & Johnson included their customers’ safety as well as their own profit and image in their idea of what made them whole. J&J demonstrated that notion of wholeness by action in the real world, not just words in a piece of advertising copy.