Integrity in a world of change.

Fair warning...this is a bit of a longer story.  The speech is edited for brevity.        

I was with my great friend Dave Rook recently and we were speaking about the world in which we live and work. Dave and I met in the early 1990's while working at 李奥贝纳 . Along with Sean Laughlin , we became fast friends and roommates, living/working together in Detroit and Chicago.

Leo Burnett was my dream job after college. I was rejected by the agency multiple times while still in college so after graduation I moved to Chicago and started working as a host at The Chicago Bar and Grill. One day I got the call for an informational interview and the next thing I new I was hired and relocating to Detroit for my first account management position (that informational interview is a story in and of itself!).

Suffice it to say I became enthralled with all things Leo - the man. Although I never met him, he lived larger than life in the culture and was a prolific writer and storyteller. He gave great speeches at the annual agency holiday breakfast meeting which was a legendary event back in the day (maybe still are?).

As Dave and I were recounting stories and talking about this "crazy world" I was reminded of one of my favorite Leo Burnett speeches titled, Integrity in a world of change. He gave the speech in 1968.

To set the scene (and for those who were not born), the world in 1968 was full of change, anger and uncertainty in many, many ways:

• February 2 - Richard Nixon declares his presidential candidacy
• ?February 18 - The US State Department declares the highest casualty toll of the Vietnam War – 543 killed and 2547 wounded the week prior
• ?April 4 – Martin Luther King Jr. was shot by one round of a 30 caliber rifle by James Earl Ray.? He was declared dead one hour later.
• ?June 5 – Robert Kennedy is shot by a Jordanian extremist in San Francisco and died in the early morning of June 6.
• ?August 28 – The Democratic National Convention held in Chicago was met with tension and violence ultimately erupting and sending 100 to the emergency room.
• October 12 – The Summer Olympic Games open in Mexico City.? On the 18th Tommie Smith and John Carlos, US athletes and medalists in the 200-meter dash further disrupt the games by performing the black power salute during the "Star-Spangled Banner" at their medal ceremony.
• ?October 31 – President Johnson announces a total halt to US bombing in North Vietnam

Leo addressed the agency at the holiday breakfast and shared these words:

Some of the people in this room today have been listening to me sound off for five, ten, twenty, even thirty years. That they have done so is indeed a sign of their patience and fortitude.

?So I shall be far from unhappy if for the next few minutes they sag in their chairs and contemplate their belt buckles.

These older friends of mine are not the ones I primarily want to address. The people I do want to speak to, as directly as I can, are the young men and women who have recently joined this organization.? You belong to the NOW generation – the generation which stands on one edge of that very-much-talked-about GAP.

You younger people have posed for us many sharp and sticky questions…about our values, the things we go for, and the ways we go about getting them.

You have more on your minds than we did at your age – about the inequalities of the social and racial and economic class structures – the war, the bomb, and the draft – the indecent presence of poverty in an otherwise sleek civilization – the Seat of Justice that no one can find in the back of the bus – the Pill that you can always find in the back of the drawer; and even the shuttling of the human heart from one rib cage to another.

You refuse to sweep these issues under the rug. You refuse to let us, if we wanted to, do the same.

But give us oldsters some credit. Maybe you think that if we are not already over the hill, we are at least poised on the downward slope of it. But, believe it or not, many more of us than you think are raising, on our edge of the GAP, the same searching questions that you are.

To say that we face a changing world today is a tedious understatement. The world has changed every minute since it first took off around the sun. What is so shockingly new about this changing world is that where it once changed imperceptibly, it now convulses and heaves and shatters and reconstitutes itself before our very eyes.

It may be true that “there is nothing new under the sun,” but different combinations of the old things can create some explosive phenomena and, as a Greek philosopher said 2500 years ago, “we never step into the same river twice.”

?Even “the truth,” at least as man has viewed it in the past, has been subject to change. Truth for Galileo was no longer truth for Newton, and Einstein’s truth differed from both.

?In short, no word is final – except one. At least in my view.

That one final word, to me, is – INTEGRITY.

Now, Integrity is an easy word to bandy about, but a hard one to define. And, of course, an even harder concept to live up to.

Integrity, as Nicholas Murray Butler once defined it – is the indispensable core of a man’s make-up – both intellectual and moral – that quality of unity, wholeness, steadfastness, straightforwardness – based solidly on indestructible convictions about what is right and honest and good for one’s fellow-man.

In this age, when all values have been brought into question, what else does a man have to fall back on but his abiding sense of personal integrity?

Nothing can ever be again as it was – except for man’s integrity. It is his, and his alone, and as unassailable as he chooses to make it.

When a man knows deep in his bones what is right, and keeps acting on it, he avoids the trap of compromise – he remains incorruptible.

He listens hard to that voice inside him which tells him not only what is right and what is wrong, but what is great and what is merely mediocre, what is beautiful and what is ugly.

That murmur is more than the voice of conscience. It is more than mere ego or stubbornness talking. It is the strong, insistent voice of integrity.

The trouble is that change – the changing times, the changing human existence – undermines a man’s ability to keep his integrity – to stay incorruptible – to reject moral or intellectual compromise. When all else changes, why shouldn’t he? When truth and values and goals and philosophies come up for grabs, aren’t steadfastness, wholeness, straightforwardness just a lot of empty nonsense? These questions come down to this one: What sense is “hanging on,” if there’s nothing left to? hang onto?

But, as I’ve tried to say – there is something left. INTEGRITY.

As the tools of persuasion grow ever more powerful, more subtle, and more sophisticated, we are increasingly faced by that great temptation – the temptation to tell it, not like it is, but how it might be, or even how it ain’t.

Now, if ever, is the time for every man to come to the aid of humanity.

And now, more than ever before, with the world in frenetic confusion – now, if ever, is the time for us to cling like wildcats to the only realities we can swear we have hold of – our own sacred and individual integrities – our own savage refusals to compromise with what we, as sensitive and thinking human beings, feel to be the truth, the unreceived truth, the truth we know in our guts to be true.

If you young people stay true to your creed and continue to recognize Integrity as the unshakable rock on which you can stand, I believe you can write, produce, and administer better advertising – that you can come to work in the morning with a greater sense of promise – that you can go home at night with a deeper sense of accomplishment.?

Finally, I believe that, even during this period of cataclysmic upheaval, when demonstrations of every kind, in our public halls, on our campuses, in our streets, seem to be so much in fashion, you can feel that at least one other variety of demonstration – the demonstration of Integrity in your daily job – will make fully as much sense as any, in getting on top of your environment and in facing your changing world constructively.

I believe it can strengthen your sense of self – your sense of purpose.

With that, Merry Christmas, amigos, and a New year that isn’t really so bad, after all.

As Dave and I concluded our visit, we were both struck by how this common bond we shared in Leo Burnett, resonated on so many levels. Not the least of which was how chillingly familiar - and relevant - the speech Leo gave hit us in the context of our current world and reality. He could literally have given it last week.

As leaders we're shaped by our experiences. My time at Leo Burnett was profound and I love the fact that sitting here today I'm reminded of how much integrity - leading with it, making decisions with it, living with it - has been a part of my journey.

H&R Block 李奥贝纳 #blockpride #integrity