I am hopeful about America’s future.
Despite the voices of doom and gloom that dominate the national news, I am hopeful because I spend much of my day with young people just starting out in their careers. The students in my classrooms over the past four or five years have been the most engaged, the most thoughtful, the most committed to the common good I have ever seen.
These are students who have grown up in the shadow of massive ethical failures by businesses like Enron, Tyco, and WorldCom. They have grown up with predictions of catastrophic consequences from climate change, a state of perpetual war in the Middle East, combative political rhetoric, and distrust in core institutions. All of this, I believe, has led them to be determined to improve the world, to be agents of goodness in a time when many of their elders have surrendered to despair and cynicism.
Something similar happened in the 1930s, when the “greatest generation” burst onto the scene, a group of young people emerging from the excesses of the Roaring Twenties to find themselves faced with starting families and careers amidst the suffering of the Great Depression and World War II.
At that time, like today, there was a movement to forge a more ethically responsible approach to public life, to be part of the solution, not part of the many problems that had led to social and economic instability both at home and abroad. One of the people leading that movement was Herbert J. Taylor.
In 1932 Taylor, a young executive at Jewel Tea Company, chose to leave his lucrative position in order to help Club Aluminum, a cookware manufacturer based in Chicago, avoid bankruptcy. He took an 80% cut in pay and invested over $6,000 of his own money in the struggling business.
He knew that turning the company around would take more than financial investments. In his autobiography he wrote: “What we needed was a simple, easily remembered guide to right conduct – a sort of ethical yardstick – which all of us in the company could memorize and apply to what we thought, said and did.”
Taylor, a devout Methodist, sat down at his desk and prayed. “Then I wrote down the twenty-four words that had come to me:
Is it the truth?
Is it fair to all concerned?
Will it build goodwill and better friendships?
Will it be beneficial to all concerned?”
He called those twenty-four words “The Four-Way Test,” and it became the centerpiece of Taylor’s effort to rebuild morale among employees and trust among dealers and customers. Every advertisement, every sales pitch, every policy was subjected to the test. The company stopped making exaggerated claims about its products. When a large sale to one dealer threatened to undercut the prices other dealers were charging, they cancelled the sale.
The effort succeeded. Within five years Club Aluminum had returned to profitability, paying off its debts and rewarding investors with dividends. Taylor understood that trust is built incrementally, by setting a high standard and then consistently working to live up to it through daily practice.
The word that appears most often in the core values of Fortune 500 companies today is “integrity.” The original meaning of the word is “wholeness” or “strength.” It contains the notion that anything divided is thereby weakened.
The Four-Way Test reminds us that there are four ways of evaluating whether any particular action is right or wrong: truth, fairness, character, and consequences. When we try to justify behavior by focusing on just one or two ways of evaluating an action, we are exercising moral partiality. Integrity is compromised whenever we selectively choose the kind of evaluation that works best for our favored position.
This can be seen in politics when conservatives emphasize the positive consequences of improved security from a travel ban while liberals insist the ban would be unfair to those adversely affected by it. It can be seen at home when parents impose a curfew out of concern for their teenager’s safety and the teenager protests that she is old enough to make her own decisions. In such cases more talk does not help to resolve the conflict, it just leads to anger and frustration. Each side is committed to just one way of thinking about the issue and is blind to any other way of evaluating. The two sides are talking past each other.
The Four-Way Test gives us a way out of such impasses, if we are willing to take it. Instead of taking a position and then looking for a way to defend it, we should step back and carefully evaluate potentially controversial topics using all four ways of ethical thinking. That is the path of integrity.
Taylor’s Four-Way Test was developed during the Great Depression and adopted by Rotary International in the midst of World War II. It was embraced by a generation who understood that difficult times require us to raise our standards, not lower them.
We are living in difficult times today. And the generation coming of age right now is not going to be satisfied with empty platitudes. They are ready to embrace integrity in all that we think, say, and do.
It is a good time to remember, and put into practice, the Four-Way Test.
