Examples in the business software industry alone include, Computer Associates’s execs being jailed for SEC violations and McAfee facing a $50M penalty for accounting trickery. But compliance is actually further down the Maslow hierarchy of needs. Corporate integrity would be a higher rung which calls corporate managers to “do the right thing” and elevate the organizations’ contribution beyond its immediate stakeholders.

One new voice on the topic of corporate integrity and accountability is Donna Kennedy-Glans, author of "Corporate Integrity: An Toolkit for Managing Beyond Compliance.” I met her at the SAP GRC conference in Orlando, Florida last week, and found her an engaging and credible speaker. I highly recommend her book because her tools and templates make integrity measurable and actionable. I especially recommend applying her “Integrity Ladder” and “Integrity Grid” tools which can help organizations set clear objectives for integrity and pinpoint areas for organization changes that can help move it up the integrity ladder if that’s an explicit corporate goal.

Donna nicely illustrates how each department (finance, HR, legal, operations, etc.) plays a critical role in acting with integrity. What was missing for me in her book is the role of sales and marketing in corporate integrity. Perhaps it’s contained in “operations” or embedded in public relations which is often invoked for damage control after the fact. I would build on her case for corporate integrity by having sales and marketing execs consider the following questions as a checklist for your own corporate integrity contributions:

• Do you just comply with CAN-SPAM laws which protect people from unwanted mail or go beyond by finding ways to build trust with customer prospects through nurturing campaigns?
• How close is your customers’ post-purchase experience to the promise you set in the pre-sales phase? The bigger the gap the bigger the “out of integrity” customers will perceive between what you told them and what you delivered.
• How does your organization handle loss or failure? A company’s true colors often come out in adversity such as in a product failure or loss of a customer to a competitor. How well do you show your management team the links between product performance, customer retention and brand reputation?
• What actions build or diminish brand reputation? How strongly do you advocate for brand building outside the typical marketing tactics of advertising and PR? For instance, do you push for investments in the product development phase that would improve customer satisfaction, your suppliers’ contribution to your brand, reduce warranty returns, etc?

Finally, I personally believe that integrity is as much about “being” as it is about “doing.” Donna spends much of her book on “doingness” which is perhaps exactly what we need in this era of leadership lapses, malfeasance, and disappointing behaviors. But I would like to think that corporations and individuals can always be inspired to be honorable. After all, as Donna points out in attributing Socrates, integrity is virtue. It’s time we valued this virtue more. Behaviors will follow.