Why did I write a book about honesty?
I stick my neck out for honesty at my own peril. We live in a time when everyone’s living their own truth, when objective facts have fallen victim to alternative ones, and outright deceit has carried CEOs to massive paychecks and politicians to Washington. Folks will come out of the woodwork to spot inaccuracies and untruths in this book and rub them in my face. And that’s OK. I’m ready for it. You’ll be right to point out my fallacies, and I’m proud to know enough to be thankful for what you’ll teach me. Cynics will read this tome and assume I must be too naive to understand how the world really works. I vividly remember the advice of a senior banker early in my career: “Say what you have to say to get the client half-pregnant, and then it’s harder for them to back out.” I shuddered then, and I shudder now to think of what people have done in the name of making money. Which brings us back to why I wrote this book. In a word: sustainability.
I believe that in a world made increasingly transparent by technology, deceit is not a sustainable way to earn success—personally or professionally. Along with JUST Capital, I believe that with more information, consumers will make different choices, choices that will reward the honest. I believe that capitalism as we know it must evolve if it’s going to survive our growing wealth gap, and that all corporations will soon be incentivized to be noble stewards of society rather than profiteers from it.
I believe that we’re experiencing the beginning of the end of some of the biggest concerns in our community, and that we’ll soon see more equitable resolutions on issues like gender inequality, race relations, and a whole host of others that should have been eradicated long ago. I believe that the people around us grow more cynical by the second, and that objective truth will be the only way to restore trust. I believe that deceit, not ineptitude, is what holds most leaders and organizations back from greatness, because I’ve seen it over and over and over again in the conference rooms of Fortune 500 companies and start-ups alike. And I believe that we all have some serious self-exploration to do along with a grave responsibility to set aside our egos and entitled attitudes and step off our social media soapboxes. If we don’t, we’ll only grow further apart.
It doesn’t have to be that way. Charlotte McCourt wrote that some of her cookies taste like crap, and people showed their respect for her doing so by buying nearly thirty thousand boxes of cookies. J. Patrick Doyle went on national TV to say his pizza sucks, everybody knows it, and he’s going to do something about it. Shareholders went nuts, lifting his stock by 3,268 percent. Dan Hesse at Sprint took a page out of Buffett’s long-term playbook and tore the guts out of his own company so it would survive. His customers thanked him with their approving patronage, awarding Sprint with the highest customer satisfaction ratings in the American Customer Satisfaction Index and lifting Sprint’s stock roughly 30 percent more than the S&P 500. The Ritz-Carlton told its customers to get in line behind its employees, because its employees must come first. Not only did their customers return year after year to fuel a global expansion but also fifty thousand executives worldwide flocked to get The Ritz’s leadership training. Ray Dalio invited his team to tell him he was wrong so that he could ensure he never would be. Being the world’s biggest hedge fund would seem to indicate that his strategy has paid off. Let’s not forget Quicken Loans, who stole the mortgage market from larger incumbents by inviting its employees to ask dumb questions and then giving them the leeway to answer those questions with action. And then there’s Bethenny Frankel, who went from broke thirtysomething to Real Housewife to millionaire entrepreneur by completely owning the fact that she didn’t fucking know.
I believe all these success stories come back to one common core: honesty. That’s why I wrote a book about it. I spent years observing greatness and failure in the business world and wondering where the root cause was, and I found the core challenge in honesty—about what’s going on in the community, in others, and in the self. Yet we’ve spent pages and pages together without a clear definition of what honesty even is. I’ve twisted it into many forms, from straight-up truth-telling, to treating others with psychological respect, to diving into your blind spot, to unearthing innovative ideas and taking bold action. Kind of convenient for me, right? But hopefully you’re developing a sense of what honesty is and what it definitely is not.
WHAT IS HONESTY?
For Russell Weiner, honesty means doing, not saying. “You’re not really honest unless you change,” he explained. For Jay Farner, honesty means transparency. “Bringing transparency to anything is what makes the difference,” he said. “People will see it and that will inspire them to want to work at your organization when they see you’re genuine and authentic and trusting.”
Dan Hesse defines it as “integrity . . . that’s what honesty in business means to me . . . we had it in our culture, and one thing we’ve learned—not only through studies but over the years—is really successful companies have strong cultures. Honesty and integrity are really important, and customers thrive on it.”
For Rohit Malik, honesty means authenticity. “That you mean what you say,” he clarified, “and when you tell somebody something, [it’s] a commitment when you give someone your word.” Malik also identifies honesty as “being really authentic with who you really are, with your employees, your customers, your shareholders, and to not overmarket yourself to be someone you’re not.”
For Alexander McCobin, honesty is simply telling the truth. “In practice,” he offered, “that [means] being truthful about the situation that a business or person is in, being vulnerable to admit when there are mistakes or things that are not going well, and also not deceiving oneself.” For Ray Dalio, honesty means “saying what you think: the opposite of duality. Being forthright, honest, and accurate; describing things as you really see them [and] as they really are.”
Honesty is all those things—along with the canary in the gold mine of our moral compass and the sinking feeling we get when we’re even slightly off-course in our lives and businesses. To me, an honest business leader is someone who acknowledges the good news and the bad news and everything in between. It’s about being brutally honest about what’s going on with your customers—what problems they have and what solutions they crave. It’s about designing a business that takes care of all constituents, facilitates growth and change, and helps empower people to innovate. It’s about giving and taking feedback without offense; listening to the diverse perspectives of others; and considering that, as Ray Dalio says, we’re all just dumb humans needing to open our primitive minds and learn a whole lot more. Living honestly means properly assessing the people around us, getting honest about what it takes to motivate and inspire them, and being unafraid to make changes to ensure we surround ourselves with the right people. It also means not succumbing to Warren Buffett’s institutional imperative, and understanding that if we don’t innovate, we might just cease to exist at all.
HONESTY: A PROFITABLE BUSINESS MODEL
The Heart Attack Grill, founded by Jon Basso, purposely serves burgers, fries, and other foods high in fat, sugar, and cholesterol. In fact, the 8,000-calorie “bypass” burger is a favorite, as are the “flatliner fries” cooked in pure lard. The entire Las Vegas–based restaurant is themed like a hospital; customers wear hospital gowns, the waitstaff are “nurses,” and customer orders are called “prescriptions.”1 Customers can also weigh in if they want to prove that they’re over 350 pounds, because if they are, they eat for free.
Despite our country’s current health movement, the Heart Attack Grill is thriving—earning not only patrons and fans but also media coverage for its outlandish commitment to harming its own customers. And yet, this is a classic case of caveat emptor—buyer beware—and customers can’t not be aware of what they’re getting into.
A moral hazard? Maybe. Dishonest? I don’t think so. All around us, dishonesty tempts us with miracle diets and fake shed restaurants. But the Heart Attack Grill isn’t one of those; instead, it shows us how powerful honesty can be in business. For better or worse, the Heart Attack Grill shows us that being honest, transparent, and authentic, even when the honest truth is harmful, can indeed produce profits. Should it is another ethical matter entirely, plus there’s the issue of whether killing the customers who support your business is good business in the first place.
But at least the Heart Attack Grill is honest about its burgers and fries; which other fast-food restaurant can claim as much?
Perhaps Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes and Vice Media’s Shane Smith preferred dishonesty because somehow they considered it simpler: just create your own reality, blindly follow it, and don’t bother dealing with the nuances of honesty at all. They certainly show that living your own truth can work—for a time, and until the truth catches up with you (which is surely why that phrase exists). But I suspect the Heart Attack Grill will survive for the long term, with nothing to hide, because the truth is that it’s actually simpler to just be honest. In the face of such open candidness, what can we say about the Heart Attack Grill that it hasn’t already said about itself? Indeed, brutal honesty has the power to render attacks powerless.
YOUR NEXT STEP IS HONESTLY UP TO YOU
Reminders to be honest exist everywhere—in our vernacular when we say, “to be honest . . . ,” in our mottoes and mission statements, in our legends and stories (who doesn’t know Pinocchio?), and in every Hallmark holiday movie that advises us to find our true selves. In high school at Milton Academy, I was reminded daily: Dare To Be True. At Brandeis as an undergrad, I read the seal declaring Truth Even Unto Its Innermost Parts. Thanks in part to Rohit Malik, Columbia Business School again reminded me to adhere to truth. The damn concept followed me around everywhere. I thought it was a throwaway. Didn’t everyone know to be honest? Don’t we learn that as kids? And in true Peter fashion, I was wrong. Despite the fact that honesty permeates our language, our stories, our religions, our institutes of higher learning, and more, it doesn’t always infiltrate real life, to our own detriment. When you look at the life you’ve created, have you been honest with yourself? When you open up your corporate policies, is honesty really one of them? If not, isn’t that ironic if we’re to believe that honesty is, in fact, the best policy of all?
Very soon, honesty will be a prerequisite to greatness, because honesty is sustainable—both in your organization and in yourself. How long can your organization survive with roadblocks and blind spots and the institutional imperative? How long can you live being out of alignment with who you really are? Being honest is just so much easier than inventing ways around the truth, don’t you think?
Unfortunately, dishonesty disguises itself as honesty all too often, frequently in our own heads and ubiquitously in the business world. We conjure a thought, or take an action, and then rationalize what we’ve done to protect our delicate egos from admitting that we’ve made a mistake. On the scale of a business, those protective instincts compound into terrible consequences that pollute both our world and our ethics. We humans fight an uphill battle with what is true, but I hope you’ll agree that honesty not only gives you a strategic tool to create spectacular results in your life and business; it also represents the future of commerce in an increasingly transparent world that won’t tolerate deceit for much longer.
At least, as a millennial, that’s my hope. It’s a brave new world with lots more choices than we’ve ever had before, brought to us by lots more information than anyone had ever thought possible. During this seismic time, it behooves us to realize that we, as both business leaders and consumers, all want the same happiness, success, and safety. It’s just that the world is moving faster. It’s only getting worse or only getting better, depending on how you look at innovation and technology. Soon, wearable and even implanted technology will become the norm, and that will set off an entirely new and uncharted ecosystem of business in which we merely think of an item we need and it arrives on our doorstep within an hour. When our minds ask for the best products from the most reputable companies, will yours make the short list?
Right now, in this fascinating infancy of information ubiquity, organizations have an opportunity to recognize what is different and what is the same, and to reorganize themselves toward a future that will reward transparency and bravery and render meaningless secrecy and fear. There is a formula to success; there is a constant about the nature of how humans understand reality, interact, and trust each other. Don’t delay. Now is the time for change, because preparing now is the only sound business strategy that makes any sense in a world moving at this speed.
Here’s the best part: you have the ultimate power to use brutal honesty to achieve massive success. You, as a business leader, are a constant source of morals, values, and decision-making acumen. You have the power to help your brand evolve and innovate, and to inspire your colleagues to embrace honesty, too. You have a responsibility to honestly get to know yourself, accept yourself, and love yourself. In fact, in coaching leaders, growing companies, and helping clients innovate and grow, I’ve seen that few people truly understand, accept, and love who they are. As New York Times best-selling author Lewis Howes once told me, “Everything negative usually stems from people not understanding who they are. They’re judging themselves and other people. We haven’t learned the art and skill of falling in love with who we are. And that is the biggest struggle.”
Indeed, it’s tough out there in the world. In our modern times, it seems like everything needs to be overhauled. With environmental damage and fake accounts and falsified emissions reports and deliberately addictive medications, our business world kind of sucks sometimes. Our politics suck all the time. Occasionally, the ego-driven attitudes of our ungrateful, entitled friends, family members, and colleagues suck, too. But you don’t have to suck. You can just be honest. Honestly you. If you’re not going to embrace your honest self, you’ll never give others the chance to embrace the true you, either. And when that happens, everybody loses.
You get fifty million choices to make every day, and I can only hope you’ll make some of them more honest. But no matter what you do, just remember to accept the fact that your actions are the bread crumb trail that tells you who you are. And at the end of the day, when you’re creeping along the hallways of eldercare with your walker and cane, I hope you can look back and think, Well, at least I was honest.
Confucius, perhaps the greatest executive leader who never was, knew the truth: “To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.”2 Honesty with the self is perhaps the most difficult level of honesty, but it takes being honest on three levels to achieve the industry-dominating results of the greatest leaders of our time:
First, you must be brutally honest about the world around you, the industry around you, and the environment in which you live and work.
Second, within that context, you must be honest with and about the others around you so you can find and inspire the right people to help you achieve your biggest goals and live your most fulfilling life.
Third, you must be honest with yourself about who you really are, what you really want, and what it will take to get there.
When you get into honest alignment, you’ll inevitably accept your real dreams, fears, desires, and goals. When you do that, you’ll rearrange your life by embracing the people who will join your fight and help you achieve greatness. That’s how industry-dominating results happen; not through sheer will or supreme intellect but by embracing honesty as a strategic tool to bend your world toward you and thrive.
In a life with no guarantees, we all have the choice to embrace honesty and allow fortune to favor us—the bold—for who we really are.
Will you join us?