American billionaire Warren E. Buffett says: If you are looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence and energy. If the person you want to hire does not have the first quality, the other two will kill you.
Let us presume that the person you want to hire is a very intelligent person. She or he has an excellent academic record and is in the top ten of her or his class of 100 students. This is a very intelligent person, a genius in his or her field of study and expertise.
Let us also presume that this person has a lot of energy, zeal and passion for his or her work. He has boundless energy for the job assigned to him. She can work for many hours straight and still has energy left to conclude the work of the day. No doubt we want such a person in our company or whatever organization we are running.
Now let us go back to Buffett’s saying: if this person does not have the first quality, which is integrity, that person will kill your company or organization. Integrity is the cement that binds together the other qualities of intelligence and energy.
How does a person without integrity kill an organization or a company? An employee who is very intelligent but not ethical will use her of his intelligence to fill his or her pockets until the organization dies. He or she will kill your company using that intelligence.
The same person, the one with plenty of energy, will use that energy to fleece your company, using that same energy. When there is a combination of intelligence and energy without integrity, the results are disastrous for any organization, company or government office.
In our country we hear endless stories of our national resources being stolen by no other than very intelligent people, energetic people, but who lack integrity.
This is why it never ceases to amaze me that we do not have courses in ethics and integrity in our schools, colleges and universities. I teach an ethics course online for a University in Chicago, USA. Every student in that university, all 26 thousand of them, must take three or four courses in ethics before they graduate. Why are we not doing so here? Buffett is right: you need those three virtues in all of us: intelligence, energy and integrity.
