The juice itself has a consistent quality from bottle to bottle, week to week, month to month, and year to year.

Of course, none of this occurs by happenstance. Many different people within the Tropicana organization and its suppliers must have taken deliberate steps to do a good job.(This supposition is confirmed by an article I found on Tropicana’s New Bottling Facility.)

I know nothing about the Tropicana organization except what I can infer from the juice it sells. But I am confident that the culture is enfused with a commitment to quality that affects everything they do, from how they dress, how they run meetings, how they work with each other, to how they select the oranges, how they pick and pack them, how they store them, and, ultimately, how they make the juice.

Contrast that experience with what all of us have encountered far too often with organizations that provide mediocre goods and services. Who has not chafed when a machine answers the customer service line with the message, “Please hold. Your call is very important to us. Someone will be with you shortly?” And then we hear some tinny music or, worse, the same advertisement for Brake Busters Products, for 5 or 10 minutes or longer, all without ever knowing how long this will last. And then someone picks up the phone who is unable to answer our question or find someone who can.

This kind of treatment is disrespectful; some might even call it contemptuous. It’s not good work. The people in charge of this part of the organization are not doing the best they can.

How do I reach this conclusion? Because I, like you, have had experience with automated answering systems that do a much better, much more polite job. They indicate approximately how long the wait will be. They offer you choices, such as the option to leave your number for a call back later, so that you don’t have to hold the phone indefinitely. They tell you that you can send an email or go to a chat window online.

Midphase Hosting, the service that hosts this website, is like that. That is one of the reasons I chose it and continue to use it. Whenever something comes up where I need help at anytime of the day and on any day of the week, I can get quick help through a chat service.

Doing good work is a business virtue. When I talk about the 7 core business virtues or, as I sometimes call them, the 7 habits of trustworthy people and organizations, I mention this one first: Do good work. If you exchange value for value, the value you give should be the best of which you are capable given the available time and resources. That doesn’t mean everyone has to build a Rolls Royce. But if you make Chevrolets, make them the best possible Chevrolets. Don’t skimp on effort. Or, as the marketing slogan puts it, at Ford, Quality is Job 1.

Mediocrity is a vice. Excellence is a virtue. Not everyone can excel at the same level. We all know that. But everyone can do the best she can. Everyone can make the best effort. No one should accept a mediocre result—from herself or others—if time and resources are available to do a better job.

What’s the difference between then and now? In a word, seatbelts. We’ve learned to buckle up because seatbelts save lives.

In the business world, harassment, bullying, and abuse routinely cost employers between $300 and $1,000 per employee per year and cause enormous grief two targets of misconduct.

We can prevent most of that senseless financial cost and personal harm by putting policies, training, monitoring, and enforcement procedures in place. Taking these steps is like installing seatbelts and buckling up.

Of course, putting even the best policy on the shelf without communicating it effectively to employees is like sitting on your seatbelt. When the car slides off the road and flips upside down, it’s too late to try to buckle up.

To learn more about how you can reduce the costs of harassment, bullying, and abuse in your organization, visit the Ethics By Design section on workplace harassment training or contact us at 802 870 3450.

When the Susan G. Komen Foundation decided to cut about $700,000 of funding for breast cancer screening provided by Planned Parenthood, millions of people undoubtedly wondered, “What were they thinking? Why would they take this potentially controversial step?”

We can infer widespread befuddlement because announcement of the decision led to massive outcries by public figures of all stripes as well as gestures of solidarity with Planned Parenthood, including a donation to Planned Parenthood’s cancer screening work by Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

The official reason the Foundation’s leaders gave was a rule against funding organizations that are under investigation, which, at the moment, applies to Planned Parenthood–and only Planned Parenthood–because of an investigation commenced by the chair of a Congressional committee. (We’ll return to the problematic nature of this rationale in a later blog post.)

The Foundation’s board of directors issued a statement that its “original desire was to fulfill our fiduciary duty to our donors by not funding applications made by organizations under investigation.”

At this point, we in the general public have almost no other information that would help us analyze how the board formed a judgment about its fiduciary duty in this regard. But from the available facts, we can ask whether the board appears to have used a correct understanding of the concept of fiduciary duty when it made that judgment.

A fiduciary duty arises out of a special kind of legal relationship between a principal and an agent or a trustor and a trustee. The principal/trustor transfers property or authority to the agent/trustee. Typically, the principal expects the agent to use the property or authority for the benefit of the principal or a designated beneficiary in accordance with express or implied conditions (e.g., to take care of children, to conduct cancer research, etc.) and not for any other purpose the agent might think of.

Although the agent may have legal title to the property or delegated authority, it may not use that power for its own benefit or to pursue its own agenda. It must maintain complete faith (fiducia) with the principal–even if doing so involves a cost or disadvantage to the agent.

The board of trustees and the top-level executives of the Komen Foundation, like trustees and executives of every corporation, whether a non-profit or commercial enterprise, had fiduciary duty. It comes with the job.

But to whom did they owe this fiduciary duty? And what did it consist of?

Put differently, in corporations, who is the principal/trustor and what is the content of the trust relationship?

It is understandable that some may see the donors to the Komen Foundation (or the shareholders of a commercial corporation) as the principal to whom a fiduciary duty is owed. (Even some courts have based decisions on this view.) But it also makes sense to see the corporation itself as the principal. In fact, a thoroughgoing analysis of the corporate entity leads to the conclusion that this is a better understanding of the fiduciary relationship at hand.

Either way, however, the content of the duty is governed by the charter and legally adopted policies of the organization itself, not by the dictates of the donors or shareholder. This is legally and morally the case.

When donors give to a charity, they do so with the actual or constructive knowledge of its official mission and policies. They have a right to expect that the board and executives remain faithful to that mission and those policies. That is where their fiduciary duty lies. (There is an analogous relationship between shareholders and the board of a commercial enterprise.)

The members of a charitable foundation have no right to direct the actions of the board or executives except through procedures established by the charter and bylaws of the organization. Typically, only the board can change policies and procedures. But the members can elect the board, and, if the board puts a policy matter to the vote of the membership, the membership can decide it as well.

But no donor or group of donors–no matter how much money they give–has the right to dictate policy. And the board and executives do not owe a fiduciary duty to the donors. Instead, their fiduciary duty runs to the mission and policies that are the basis for the donations themselves.

If, therefore, the board of the Komen Foundation believed its decision to defund Planned Parenthood was dictated by the donors (or their interests), its judgment was ill informed. That is not where its fiduciary duty lies.

To make a proper judgment about its fiduciary duty vis a vis continued funding breast cancer screening performed by Planned Parenthood, it should have examined its mission and policies, asking whether it was appropriate to fund the breast cancer work of Planned Parenthood based on that mission and those policies. And in announcing the decision, it should have made precisely clear which aspects of the mission or policies would be violated by continuing to fund the breast cancer screening of Planned Parenthood.

The founder and CEO of the foundation made a statement on YouTube stating that its original decision was motivated solely by the desire to fulfill its mission better: Nancy Brinker Explains the Defunding Decision.

However, since recording and publishing this message, the Komen Foundation has reversed its decision to defund the cancer screening work of Planned Parenthood and issued an apology to the American public for that original decision. (See In Reversal, Komen to Continue Funding.)

Some have suggested that the board’s original decision was motivated by concerns other than its fiduciary duty to the mission and policies of the organization and that its reference to a rule about investigations was a pretext for another agenda. (See Top Susan G. Komen Official Resigns.)

This recent reversal tends to bolster that view.

That will be the subject of a later post, in which I will explore the possibility of violating a fiduciary duty by pursuing a personal agenda.

Scientists report that an extensive repertoire of misogynistic language and attitudes is cultivated in middle and high school, which contributes to the mental and emotional conditions conducive to verbal and physical violence against women. (See, e.g., Dating Aggression, Sexual Coercion, and Aggression-Supporting Attitudes Among College Men as a Function of Participation in High School Sports.) Too often, coaches tolerate this behavior or pretend not to know it’s going on.

Should it surprise us, therefore, when violent language targeted at women continues unabated at the college level?

University of Vermont

The University of Vermont now has the distinction of joining Yale University in having male students who have openly engaged in despicable acts of woman hating. According to the Burlington Free Press, members of the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity at UVM circulated a survey containing several inappropriate questions, including the following: “Who would you like to rape?”

Whoever composed this survey question seems not to have thought at all. If they did consider what they were doing, they exercised extremely bad judgment, to say the least. But my guess is that those responsible were surprised at the outcry. Why? Because they’ve probably heard or said worse while growing up, and no one ever told them it was wrong. To the contrary, as noted above, woman hating is part of male adolescent culture.

There is a growing body of research on the prevalence and function of rape myths in the facilitation of violence against women. (See, e.g., “Rape Myth Acceptance: Exploration of its Structure and its Measurement.”) Those at the University of Vermont and other organizations who want to prevent sexual harassment might want to spend time reading this literature.

Another aspect of the problem is the herd mentality that can neutralize normal moral sensitivity and silence those who might have misgivings. It is a kind of feral groupthink. Once this kind of group action is set in motion, it rarely happens that any individual will speak up to call a halt to it. Organizational leaders must work proactively to prevent it.

It is a sign of the progress we are making as a society that the national Sigma Phi Epsilon organization immediately suspended the UVM chapter and the university leadership has launched a full-scale investigation while expressing the view that the survey question was both morally wrong and possibly a violation of criminal law.

Yale University

At Yale University earlier this year, fraternity students marched around campus chanting, “No means yes. Yes means anal.” over and over and over again. 16 Yale women filed a class action law suit, claiming that Yale had a long history of tolerating not only blatant sexism and misogyny but even repeated incidents of rape and other forms of violence against women on campus.

We rightly expect college and university officials to act swiftly and decisively not only to stop sexist and misogynistic behavior when it occurs but to put programs in place designed to prevent it in the first place.

Even if academic institutions ignored their moral obligations to prevent sexual harassment, the force of law should get their attention. Sexual harassment is illegal under Title IX of the Civil Rights Act. Violations can lead to sanctions up to and including the cancellation of all federal research grants and other funding. Yale University receives over $500 million in federal research money.

In the wake of the Yale story, Vice President Biden traveled to the University of New Hampshire to call attention to that institution’s Sexual Harassment and Rape Prevention Program (SHARP). In his speech, the Vice President stated: “No means no. No means no if you’re drunk or you’re sober. No means no if you’re in bed in a dorm or on the street. No means no even if you said yes at first and you changed your mind.”

Sexual harassment is a societal problem, which our society has been working for decades to eliminate. The 17th anniversary of the Violence Against Women Act on September 11 was marked by various observances, including a video on the White House website: 1 is 2 Many.

To return to the question at the outset of this post, what responsibility does each of us have to help assure that the public schools in our area put a stop to misogyny in the locker room?

We can all contribute to putting an end to the scourge of sexual harassment. Sometimes it requires little more than picking up the phone to call the local school administrators.

I’m not talking about losing an investment. Rather, in this case it’s money in a client trust account that someone (we don’t know who) “borrowed” for as-yet undisclosed purposes. The money is gone.

There are laws against this sort of thing. It is a strict no-no in any profession that deals with client funds. Lawyers get disbarred for co-mingling client funds with their own even if they never take or use a penny of client money. (If they happen to spend money belonging to clients and get caught, they go to jail.) Similar laws apply to the financial industry.

Jon Corzine, the CEO of MF global, when testifying before Congress recently, was unable to explain what happened to the money. And he was somewhat evasive when talking about it. (Click on the picture of Corzine to the right to watch the testimony.)

William Black, a law-school professor, former prosecutor of malefactors in the Savings and Loan scandal of the 80′s, and author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One, recently appeared on the public radio program, On Point with Tom Ashbrook, and explained that we have set up a system in which people receive giant bonuses for taking huge risks with other peoples’ money when these bets pay off but pay little or no price when their casino-like gambling comes a cropper. (You can hear the On Point interview online at The Lessons of MF Global.)

No doubt, there are people who nevertheless act responsibly, making sure that they do not put the company at risk. But others do not exercise such restraint. From their perspective, they would be fools to do so. In their minds, it would be like turning a possibly lost suitcase containing $100,000 into the police. It might be wrong to keep the money, perhaps, but since it’s easy to get away with, let’s go for it.

As Black explains in a short video interview, if top-level leadership (in this case Jon Corzine) allows or encourages such behavior, those who do not play along–the good guys–get ostracized or fired. A culture of gambling and fraud develops.

We will not stop this kind of system-threatening behavior until we increase the costs of such bets high enough to focus the minds of top executives. (In a recent post, Getting Away with Grand Theft Economy, I discussed the failure of the Justice Department to use the Sarbanes-Oxley Act as a basis for prosecuting CEO’s and CFO’s from Countrywide and other companies that appear to have filed misleading financial statements. Rules are not enough. They must also be enforced.)

Or, perhaps we should try Jayne Barnard’s suggestion to reintegrate shaming in response to corporate misdeeds.

As William Black says, we must eliminate the perverse incentives that encourage bad behavior.

Neuroscience and psychology have made great contributions to the science of ethics in recent years, helping us better understand why good people do bad things. But we don’t need state-of-the-art science to tell us that perverse incentives will attract enough people willing to do stupid or venal things that seriously damage the rest of us. We’ve known that since Socrates and Plato and before.

Those responsible for the development and operation of organizations would do well to apply this lesson at the micro-economic level as well.

Questions like this have mixed reference points. Part of the analysis concerns operational issues such as what kind of compensation is necessary to attract and keep good talent for an organization, can the organization afford the compensation, what are the implications for the salaries of others in the organization, what trade offs might be involved, and so on.

Another part of the question relates to the legitimacy issues or ethical matters generally. Even if the organization can afford to pay the CEO large sums of money, is it legitimate to do so?

Here the challenge is to find appropriate standards with which to make that assessment. Is it a matter of comparing the CEO’s compensation with that of other CEO’s in comparable leadership positions (as appears to be the questioner’s thinking)? Or should the compensation by assessed in comparison to that of other employees in the organization? How does the proposed action square with the organization’s stated values? Is it just?

Or is legitimacy irrelevant? Is it purely a practical matter of what the market will bear and nothing more?

Many people have expressed the view that executive compensation in some Wall Street firms and large corporations has become excessive–even obscenely excessive–especially when compared with that of lower level employees. They seem to be expressing a feeling that there is some injustice afoot here.

On the other hand, it would be difficult to find an executive who openly states that he is being paid more than he is worth or should be paid.

Implicitly Lucy Kellaway’s correspondent poses a more basic question: How should we decide questions that have a moral component such as this one? Should we just rely on our instincts, our sense of right and wrong? Or is there a better way?

It seems to me that the compensation committee and ultimately the board of every organization should make an effort to develop standards and guidelines for making such decisions after having given due consideration to the legitimacy component. Well-governed organizations should not leave this kind of question to the ad hoc thinking of the particular people who happen to sit on the committee at any given moment.

As to whether the writer should resign, well, that is another matter about which Lucy and some of her readers will doubtless their views in a few days.

This is the reaction that most of us have to the Wall Street bailout episode. We don’t see that the financial system was rescued (which appears to have been the case). Rather, we see that people who caused the near collapse of our financial system through their unrestrained greed and folly not only were saved from the consequences of their misconduct but also pocketed fat bonuses directly as a result of the infusion of taxpayer dollars into the system. Moreover, some of these beneficiaries of the taxpayer-funded rescue have the gall to claim they are making truckloads of money solely because they are smarter than the rest of us.

The process by which this happened was neatly summed up in Bet Against the American Dream, a song produced by NPR’s Planet Money:

An average citizen/taxpayer would need to have almost no moral sensitivity not to be outraged at this turn of events.

The outrage was fueled further on Sunday, December 4, 2011, when the CBS news program 60 Minutes broadcast two stories about whistleblowers whose reports of widespread fraud and other violations of law by a top-level executives in some financial institutions appear thus far to have been ignored by federal prosecutors.

In the story, Steve Kroft interviewed Frank Portnoy, an expert on banks and the financial crisis and author of FIASCO: The Inside Story of a Wall Street Trader, who said that he believed there were instances where CEOs and CFOs violated the criminal provisions of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act by certifying that their companies had adequate financial controls when that clearly was not the case.

Yet, when Kroft interviewed Lanny Breuer, the head of the criminal division at the Justice Department, we got almost no information on why the federal government has yet to charge any of the high-level executives in the financial industry with violattions of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act or any other criminal provisions.

Anyone with a functioning moral sense would feel outraged by this state of affairs. Where is the justice? How long must we tolerate the humiliation of watching people who broke the law, endangered our entire financial system, and contributed to the loss of millions of jobs and other financial misery simply walk away with their pockets bulging?

John Hempton, an Australian financial analyst, says the financial crisis was a “systemic abuse of trust in capital markets. . . . The blowups of subprime, then of Bear Stearns, and then of Fannie exposed massive lies.” (Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera, All the Devils are Here, p. 359.)

The rage that Achilles felt when Agamemnon stole his honor at the outset of the Iliad is no greater than that felt by tens of millions of Americans. Revenge is an extremely powerful motivating force in the human makeup, which drives some to ignore self-interest until the thirst is sated.

Unlike Achilles, we generally have the criminal courts to help us channel revenge, which Francis Bacon called a kind of wild justice, helping us assuage the rage incited by serious grievances, at least partially.

But what happens when prosecutors abdicate their responsibilities? Could this failure be, in part, an explanation for the emergence of the Tea Party and the rise of Occupy Wall Street?

Simple justice demands that those who administer our criminal justice system either take steps to prosecute wrongdoers or explain to us in detail why such prosecutions are not possible.

Update on December 15, 2011

Readers of this post may find the following NY Times article by Jesse Eisinger of Pro Publica of interest: In the Hunt for Securities Fraud, a Timid S.E.C. Misses the Big Game.

I would add only that, if the evidence to prove a crime is not there, prosecutors would be irresponsible were they to seek an indictment merely to placate an angry public. That said, what we know from various sources indicates that there is probable cause to go after those CEO’s and CFO’s who signed false financial statements. And, at some point, someone must be called to account for the crime of diverting client trust funds at MF Global. (See Heads I Win, Tails You Lose.)

Sports journalists almost unanimously condemned Suh’s behavior and most stated that the league should impose at least a two-game suspension to send a message both to Suh and other players that this misconduct would not be tolerated in professional football. (In criminal law, we call this specific and general deterrence.)

Not all journalists, however, joined this chorus of condemnation. ESPN commentator Jeff MacGregor writes, “The very premise of professional football — gaining advantage over your opponent by the sustained strategic and tactical application of great violence — is unsportsmanlike. . . . Either [Suh's] style of play has deteriorated radically in his brief professional tenure, or he’s always played this way and the NFL has decided (again) that it can’t be seen to endorse the eye-gouging, finger-breaking, ankle-snapping truth of its own product.” MacGregor goes on to write that, in his view, “Mr. Suh’s only failure here is in getting caught.” (MacGregor’s comment is reminiscent of Gregory Reyes’s infamous comment about the fraudulent backdating of stock options, “It’s not illegal if you don’t get caught.”)

MacGregor seems to fall into an ancient trap that was discredited hundreds of years ago. Because war is violent the thinking went, it is silly to talk about rules. The whole point is to kill enough of the enemy to defeat them. Thus, anything goes. All’s fair in love and war . . . or, at least in war.

But we learned over time that this is fallacious reasoning. Having the right to kill in defense of one’s country does not carry with it the right to murder prisoners or to rape or terrorize non-combatants. Hugo Grotius wrote a thick treatise on the subject in the 17th Century. We punish war crimes for good reason.

The purpose of moral and legal rules is to capture consensus judgments about what is or is not acceptable behavior. They evolve over time in response to experience. As the future Justice Holmes put it, “The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.”

Such is the case with rules defining football, which those in charge have changed continually ever since college students from Rutgers, Columbia, Princeton, and Yale met in 1873 to lay out the first set. In the days before helmets, padding, face guards, and other protective devices, the game was so violent that broken bones were routine and people died playing it. Indeed, after 19 deaths on the gridiron in 1905, President Roosevelt, himself no timid soul, threatened to shut the game down unless rules were devised to make it safer. They were.

It may well not be possible to make football sufficiently safe to justify playing it under any conditions or any set of rules. Reports of permanent neurological damage resulting from helmet-to-helmet collisions provides a growing body of evidence supporting this conclusion.

But the fact that it continues to be played is no justification for playing it without restraints on unnecessary violence. The rules prohibiting what Ndamukong Suh did help reduce the number of injuries occurring in the game. Mitigation of damage where possible is always a moral good, even–or especially–in football.

Judging from some of the comments by national pundits and other journalists as well as from the remarks by Herman came himself, there appears to be continued confusion about what constitutes sexual harassment in the workplace.

For example, in a recent column in the New York Times, David Brooks suggested that the accusations against Herman Cain involved a “violation of a gentlemanly code of behavior.” In the same column, Brooks wrote:

Where is the harassment line these days? If an employer asks a woman to come to his hotel room and she says no and he lets the matter drop, is that harassment? I confess I’m not sure. I’ve worked at places where people who worked together had romantic relationships. [Is Herman Cain Finished?]

Let’s clear up David Brooks’s uncertainty: Any suggestion by a person with supervisory authority that a subordinate have sex with him or her is an illegal act of sexual harassment for which the employer can be held liable in court.

It is shocking that David Brooks would not know this because Brooks and all other New York Times employees should have received workplace harassment training in which no doubt is left on this point.

Why is this the law? Because every supervisor, manager, or executive who makes such a suggestion also has the power to affect the subordinate’s conditions of employment, including pay, promotion, termination, assignments, and so on. In such situations, the subordinate asks herself  (and it almost always is a woman) whether she will be at a disadvantage in the organization if she refuses or whether she should go along to get along, even if she finds the proposition unwelcome. “Come up to my hotel room” is a subtle form of quid pro quo harassment.

As Brooks notes, romantic relationships exist occasionally in American workplaces. But such relationships should be confined to employees who do not supervise each other. For the reasons stated above, no supervisor should ever initiate a romantic relationship in the office.

Or, as Vice President Joe Biden reminded us a few months ago following allegations of rampant sexual harassment at Yale University, No Means No:

Joe Biden – No Means No

What about “joking around” as Herman Cain referred to some of his behavior? Telling jokes and other offensive behavior targeted at women, minorities, older workers, and other members of a protected class becomes harassment when it is severe and pervasive. Here the common-law rule that every dog gets one free bite seems to apply. Telling one off-color or ethnically offensive joke is not grounds for a harassment lawsuit. Continually making members of a protected class the butt of such crude humor constitutes hostile environment harassment, which is illegal.

In a recent program on Public Radio’s Here and Now, Katrina  Campbell of Global Compliance puts the issue in context in a discussion with the show’s host, Robin Young: “Joking Around” Isn’t Funny When it Comes to Workplace Harassment.

It’s time to get with the program. In this case, “the program” is a workplace harassment prevention program, which every organization should have in place.

Of course, that reply leads to the following question: What is a great organization? Well, it’s not necessarily the largest or the most prominent or the most profitable or even necessarily the best. Greatness is not a competition with others. Rather, a great organization does whatever it does to the best of its ability, given the time and resources available, continually working to improve the quality of its performance. Great organizations do good things for others and are rewarded by client, customer, member, employee, supplier, and community loyalty. The corner grocery store can be great. The neighborhood auto garage can be great. The local United Way or chamber of commerce can be great.

It takes people dedicated to achieving a meaningful mission, who use the best available tools and techniques and practices and procedures to accomplish that mission in cooperation with each other and with outside people and entities.

Any organization can be great. The clerk’s office of a bankruptcy court can be great. A parts supplier can be great. The economic development agency can be great. The White House can be great. A military unit can be great. Even megacorporations can be great, although here, paradoxically, it is much more difficult to meet the challenge of greatness over time.

One of the components of great organizations is dedication to a mission that inspires people to rise above the immediate task in the service of a larger, more meaningful goal. It’s about helping the workers in the quarry understand that they are building a cathedral, not just busting rocks.

The challenge is to ignite the fire of inspiration and to keep it burning while assuring that the organization has the resources, technical competencies, vision, and strategic plans needed for top performance. All great organizations have both. Chearleading without technical competency is delusional. Competency without inspiration is drugery and, in the end, spells failure.

To build and operate great organizations, we must nurture and protect a sense of transcendence within the organization. Hope, meaning, recognition, well-being, acceptance, respect, justice—all these and more point beyond the immediate. They transcend the here and now and draw us toward something better.

All great organizations can slip from greatness, sliding eventually into mediocrity and finally oblivion. The failure to recognize and adapt to changes can lead to failure, of course. Some buggy whip makers went out of business simply because the automobile made their product obsolete. But more often, mediocrity overtakes an organization gradually, as new leaders arrive who don’t understand what made Johnson & Johnson or Medtronic or Nucor Steel or King Arthur Flour or Gardner’s Supply or the Marine Corps  or the organization they just joined great in the first place. Failing to understand (or, worse, care) about an organization’s sustaining values, successors to authentic leaders may set different value priorities that are inconsistent with or even antithetical to the core values that helped the organization become great in the first place.

Vigilence about the transcendent categories—the mission, the culture of mutual respect, and the emotional and spiritual needs of those involved—is essential to the maintenance of great organizations. Like good physical health, good organizational health requires habits that reinforce the policies and practices that sustain and build on a foundation of excellence.