Conversations in Management: Admiral James B. Stockdale

"The one thing I came to realize was that if you don’t lose your integrity you can’t be had and you can’t be hurt." -Admiral James B. Stockdale

This is a pretty good insight, but Admiral Stockdale wasn’t just talking about the vagaries of every day life. He was talking about how he survived seven brutal years in Hoa Lo Prison—perhaps better known as the Hanoi Hilton. In an effort to extract a confession, his North Vietnamese jailers relentlessly tortured and abused him. He was subjected to routine whippings and beatings. He was kept in total darkness during four years of solitary confinement. He was heavily shackled in a bath stall for two years. He was subjected to a terrifying form of torture that he called simply, “taking the ropes” at least fifteen times. When his captors tried to put him on display for propaganda purposes, he slashed his scalp with a razor and beat his face to a swollen pulp to keep from being used. As the senior American officer in Hoa Lo, he was himself relentless in his efforts to maintain unity and morale among the other captives. He often paid a heavy price for this, but in the end he succeeded in getting a degree of better treatment for his men. To the day he was released in 1973, he never compromised with his captors. He never capitulated. He came home with his integrity intact.

Personal integrity was a bedrock belief for Admiral Stockdale. He understood that it couldn’t be taken for granted and had to be protected. He warned against that first compromise, the first shortcut or the tacit deal. He knew that the first surrender was the hardest, but each new compromise was easier and would inexorably begin your transformation into someone you no longer recognized.

And that’s precisely the way it is for each of us. Fortunately, most of us will never have our integrity tested by a skilled extortionist or manipulator. But we still have to navigate the seductive waters of temptation. After all, it’s rare that someone simply abandons their integrity and leaps headlong into corruption. There has to be trigger—a motivating force. Often it’s a person’s vanity, or the belief that they somehow deserve a bit more than life has offered them. Other times it might be fear or desperation. Either way, the compromise is built on the expediency of a rationalization. And once we accept that rationalization, we have to keep on believing it and we usually try to make others believe it as well. That’s why it’s not unusual to find entire work groups that falsify reports, cut corners on quality and operate with a code of silence to cover it all up. When caught, they don’t understand what the big deal is and instead blame others for the problem. These people didn’t start out this way—they became this way. It happened because somewhere in their past they made that first difficult compromise of their integrity. And compromise got easier from that time forward.

There are very few people with the extraordinary courage and conviction of Admiral Stockdale. But we’d all do well to follow the example of this great man. Without personal integrity it’s only a matter of time before you end up hurting yourself or others and before you end up being used by someone even less scrupulous. But it’s never too late to change. If your integrity is even slightly tarnished, start making the right choices now. If you find yourself tempted by compromises, shortcuts or tacit deals; step back and remember Admiral James B. Stockdale.