After an 18-year career at Arthur Andersen, John Blumberg has spent the last two decades as a full-time professional speaker and author digging ever-deeper into the well of core values and what happens when leaders go astray.
Indeed, Blumberg was an eyewitness to the infamous Arthur Andersen fall from grace. That tumble of a once prestigious accounting firm is today a text book business school case study of what happens when the greed of a few trumps integrity.
In 2002, Arthur Andersen voluntarily surrendered its licenses as Certified Public Accountants in the United States after being found guilty of criminal charges of obstructing justice relating to the firm's interference of the Securities and Exchange Commission investigation into the collapse of Enron, the Texas-based energy corporation that had filed for bankruptcy in 2001. Subsequently, the United States Supreme Court unanimously over-turned the verdict against Andersen, but the damage was done and the firm was gone.
“The greatest risk for a leader at the top doesn’t rest within the quality of his or her strategy,” says Blumberg. “It rests within the very depth of their own personal core. This alone could explain why top leaders experience needless and heartbreaking failures.”
Blumberg acknowledges the great risk a leader takes in not knowing and being grounded in a set of core values: “We don’t go running away from our values, we go drifting away. And one day we wake-up in a place we never meant to be drifting in a direction we never would have chosen.”
He is quick to point-out, however, that the greatest loss is the missed marketing potential of an unleashed set of core values.
“The most untapped and impactful resource of any leader sits precisely at the intersection of personal and organizational core values,” says Blumberg, who has written a new book, Return On Integrity: The New Definition of ROI and Why Leaders Need to Know It.
Blumberg says most organizations and their leader skim the surface of core values often treating them as an organizational or leadership brand. Yet, in a world that is moving exponentially faster, this shallow nod to core values comes at an ever-increasing risk.
Blumberg offers a three-step framework for a return on integrity approach:
1. The process begins right where we are—immersed in the reality of our current dilemma. Blumberg defines “our dilemma” as a painfully honest analysis of why building value with core values can be so evasive. It does little good to have a strategic plan unless we fully understand the obstacles that stand in our way.
2. Core values seem like a simple concept. But nothing could be further from the truth. They can become confusing quite quickly. It seems that most executives claim to know all about core values. Yet when they decide to take a second look and engage in the process, the very first question someone will ask is, “Now what exactly is the definition of a core value?”
3. This is a roadmap for a leader to follow. There are steps along the way that insure both momentum and traction. It will be harder than it looks. There will be two steps forward and one step back. Some days it will be one step forward and two steps back.
“I wrote Return On Integrity specifically for the leader at the top,” says Blumberg. “It challenges them to pick-up a shovel and dig much deeper than they ever thought possible to reveal what sits at their personal core and then at the core of the organization they lead.”
The leader at the top is the linchpin of this process.
“It may very well prove to be a leader’s greatest challenge while simultaneously holding their most important potential,” says Blumberg. “Building value with core values can certainly come from a grassroots effort. It’s just not the ideal approach, and the results of this approach are rarely sustainable. It also undermines the credibility of leaders who have to be led to their own core by their followers.”
