Today's Business Lessons
Three kinds of thieves
I
remember talking to a factory manager, who was investigating a case of
pilferage, many years ago. He said something I could never forget. He
told me that there were two things you could never eradicate in any
business organization, especially big ones with a lot of workers:
stealing and drinking on the job. I guess he was right, and he still is
today.
Pilferage in companies exists today and, depending on industry, is on
the rise. The losses incurred as a result are tragically high.
Sometimes you might think that people are forced to steal in order to
augment their income, but that is not always the case. There are white
collar crimes involving stealing in terms of big numbers as well, and
the perpetrators of these crimes are people with high economic stature
and income.
An article entitled Life’s Little Larcenies that deals with the kinds
of thieves running around in our society appeared in Reader’s Digest in
July 1997. Author Cheryl Downey reports that there is a rogue’s gallery
of people who steal from all of us.
She says thieves are classified into the following:
The Magicians
They make things disappear and claim, “No one will miss it.” It is
estimated that the hotel industry loses $100 million a year to guest
thievery. People take toilet paper, shower caps, even bolted down TV’s
and clock radios. One hotel manager caught a guest loading an entire
room’s furnishings into a pickup truck! People who take things from the
hotel many times rationalize it as taking home souvenirs. Frankly, I
don’t care how it is labeled, but to hotel management, the acts are
still labeled “stealing” and the registration cards would of course
point them to the people responsible for the crime.
The Easy Riders
These are the people who cruise life’s shortcuts and ask, “Whom does
it hurt?” These are the people who dent other people’s fenders and speed
away grateful that no one saw them. We have a lot of Easy Riders in our
country. Leave your car in the parking lot and by the time you get
home, you discover an ugly dent and you have no idea where it came from.
Suppose you are the cause of the accident. You’re in a hurry and the
driver is nowhere to be found. Simple. Leave a note or your business
card and tell the owner of the car to get in touchwith you so that you can fix the damage.
The Penny Pinchers
These are people who dodge LRT charges, alter their income tax
reports and don’t feel bad cheating a “faceless corporation.” These are
the people who will spend $2,000 for a satellite dish and then buy
illegal descrambling equipment to avoid subscription fees.
They have at least three, four maybe even five cars in their garage
inside a plush subdivision but they jump their wires so that they don’t
have to pay a lot of money for their electricity charges.
The magicians, the easy riders and the penny pinchers: they’re everywhere.
In 1987 in Columbus, Ohio, an armored car spilled more than
$1,000,000 on the freeway. People got down from their cars and went over
guard rails to scoop up cash. Only a few returned what wasn’t theirs:
Melvin Kaiser gave back $57,000. According to studies, if we know the
people who lost the money, we’ll generally give it back. Otherwise, 75
percent of the time we’ll keep the cash.
I guess that’s human nature. The fallen nature that is. This is the
reason why true integrity does not have anything to do with other people
much less with what they do and what they say, it is what we would do
even if we know that nobody would find out.
The reward of honesty is that the character of the person is
strengthened every day. His stand on truth becomes stronger and he is
unmoved with neither the pressures of circumstance nor the temptation of
easy profit. He does the right thing even if he does not know the
people affected.
The person who is a true Christian, meaning a follower of Christ is
always a man of integrity. In Christ he now has a new nature. He may not
know the people affected in a given situation but he sure knows his
Savior. The motivating factor why he does the right thing is not out of
fear for God’s wrath but out of gratitude for God’s love.
Well let me leave you with one easy handle whenever the issue of
honesty is in question: just remember the Golden Rule. The bible says
that we are to do unto others what we want others to do unto us.
This is the most practical of all ethical persuasions. But if you
will allow me to give you my unauthorized version of the golden rule, it
may be as simple as this: Do to others as if you were the others.
No comments:
Post a Comment