• These are small things, but are they proxies for larger things?
• Can you trust a company that hires a customer service manager that tolerates – if not promotes – lying to prospect?
• Will a messy restaurant be clean as well?
• Can you believe anything a liar says?
• What job performance can be expected by someone who steals from a company?

In the larger scheme of things, both in the personal and corporate world, I have witnessed these happenings, and I have witnessed that it is let go, and in many cases it is expected, and justified by the ready-made sentences: “Buyer beware”, “Gaming the System”, “Focusing only on what’s important” and variation on such themes.
BUT . . . there are HUGE advantages to deal only with people and companies that can be blindly trusted 1,000%, so why not refusing to continue any further dealings with people and companies with deceiving practices? How can anyone expect or justify to behave one way during certain circumstances, and behaving diametrically opposite during other? To the skeptics I will concede that YES, you might be wrong 5% of the time (I doubt it). Sure it might be expensive and painful to let go someone just because of a small indiscretion; or refusing to do business with one company may result in higher costs or less revenue. But isn’t the alternative a self-fulfilling prophecy where things can only get worse? And weren’t those things flowed to begin with?

Where does your company stand on this issue? Where do your people stand on this issue?
Will you attract better customers, managers, workers if you had better standards?

Do birds of feather really flock together? They did at Enron, Artur Anderson, MCI, Adelphia, Tyco . . .