Ep. 311: Do you have intentional integrity?

Guest: Rob Chesnut, author

Are you honest in all you do? Do you have integrity? You’d probably like to think you are.

The reality is like most of us, you may be soft around the edges. You might hold back the truth a little here and a bit there. It’s easy to justify that you’re doing so because you have your eye on the bigger picture.

And if you cheat a little here and little there, you do so in the belief that you know where to draw the line. Small things unfortunately lead to bigger things and they shift because what was unacceptable yesterday is today’s norm. It’s like a man who is growing a beard. It started off as not shaving for a few days, then after a little while and somewhere along the way, it became a beard. It’s difficult to define that moment when it went from not shaving to a beard because it changed status due to the accumulated aggregation of change.

The same is true of lying and cheating – in communities where we know our neighbours and the store owners we buy from; in places where employers and employees know each other and their families’ impact of dishonesty is more direct. However, as we grow into a global international chain store online marketplace, buyers and sellers don’t know each other. That, in turn, makes it easier to turn a blind eye to transgressions.

Rob Chesnut has spent his career dedicated to telling the truth, first as a US Federal Prosecutor and then as the ethics lead at major online organizations in the sharing economy. Chesnut, in his new book “Intentional Integrity,” asks and answers questions like, “Are these platforms enabling new flexible ways of working that unlock human potential, or just enabling large companies to exploit ‘gig’ workers by avoiding employment laws?”

We invited Robert Chesnut, the author of Intentional Integrity to join us for a Conversation That Matters about integrity, the challenges of being a person of integrity and why it is vitally important that we demand it of ourselves and others.