Welcome to Integrity: The Best Foundation, the book and video series that’s designed to help you live and lead with integrity. My name is Bill Pipke, and I'm the author of the book Integrity: The Best Foundation, and it will be my pleasure to lead you in this training.  

Now I suspect that all of us have experienced the negative consequence of someone's lack of integrity, even if that someone was us. At Commissioning a Lifestyle of Integrity (CLI), our goal is to help you experience the positive benefits of integrity in your life and in your leadership. So in this first session, we want to explore the value of integrity. On the screen, you see a picture of eight giraffes, and they’re all looking at us. The picture was not Photoshopped; it was taken by me in Nairobi, Game Park, Kenya; and I just rolled down the window of my car and snapped the picture.  

Now, why would eight giraffes stand together on alert? Well, the answer’s right here: in the grasslands behind our car was a hungry lioness. And the giraffes recognized that the lioness' presence threatened their safety.  

 Now, I think corruption is like a lion lurking in the grasslands. And like the giraffes, we instinctively know that there is a problem when there's a lack of integrity. Corruption endangers the well-being of our homes, our businesses, our country. And it's time that we stand together for integrity.  

Now, as a boy, I learned that integrity matters in math. I was taught that there are whole numbers, one, two, three, that are called integers. And then there are numbers which are only part of the whole, and they’re called fractions. A whole number is an integer, and an integer is the root to the word integrity. If you go to your thesaurus, it pairs the word integrity with things like honesty, completeness, incorruptibility and consistency.  

Now, when I went to college, I studied Greek, and I discovered that the word integrity is a compound word. It's a noun with a negative prefix. The negative prefix is ‘not through’, and the noun is ‘corruption’. So integrity is 'not through corruption'. Interesting.  

I don’t know if you remember this story: The Titanic?  The ship was thought to be unsinkable because of its hull that was compartmentalized. The designers believed that if a few compartments of the ship's hull were damaged, the Titanic could continue to float. Now, sadly, they were mistaken.  

And some people think it's the same in their character: They can compartmentalize.  

So, in the introduction of my book, I talk about people who hope that their selective integrity, or their “stay-out-of trouble” integrity will be good enough. But both the Titanic and lives that compartmentalize are heading for trouble.  

Now, at CLI, our hope is to develop integrity in every sector of society—not just the family, or the church, but also in education, business professions, government, sports, arts, media, and entertainment. And we do this because we don't want to fracture the society. We want to see the society become whole, like an integer.  

Now, perhaps you know about structural integrity. It's the ability of a structure to withstand its intended load without failing due to fracture or fatigue. 

 So what happens if one steel beam in a bridge is compromised? Does the bridge remain safe? Does the problem remain isolated to that one beam, or does it infect the entire structure? When one beam is load-bearing but fails, the load is actually transferred to all the surrounding support structures. Potentially, it overloads them. And so, the failure of one part impacts the other parts.  

And the same is true for you and for me. A failure personally in your integrity adds stress to the people around you. A failure in your business integrity adds stress to the entire organization. And we know this and we understand this. A lack of integrity is transferred to the people we love, to the company we serve, and the groups to which we belong. And so we come to understand that the load is always transferred.