By now you've heard about the release of the Mitchell Report on the use of performance-enhancing drugs in Major League Baseball. In case you're interested, you can read the report, all 409 pages of it, here.
MYOB isn't a sports blog or a political blog, and by now there's not much we can add to everything that's already been said and written about the sorry state of sports in general, and baseball in particular.
But, as business people, this official acknowledgment of something we knew all along, that integrity and honesty are becoming the exception, rather than the rule should be a wake up call for all of us. When our sports "heroes" are found to be cheating in the name of making more millions of dollars, we have to realize that something we once took for granted has become a rare commodity.
It would be naive to assume that baseball is the only professional sport that has an ethics problem. It would be even more naive to think that it's exclusively a sports problem. The fact is that many of us accept this behavior and even expect it. Was the Mitchell Report really a surprise to anyone?
As we reported here this past summer (Consumer Confidence), Americans trust small business more than any other American institution with the exception of the military. That's a statistic to be proud of, but it's not something to take for granted. It's extremely important to guard that trust like gold, because that's what it is.
We may all wonder when our favorite player hits a home run whether he did it honestly, or if his performance was enhanced by modern science, but we can't afford for even one of our customers to wonder if we've treated them fairly; if we've played by the rules.
Back in the days when everyone lived by the Golden Rule, integrity was part of the deal. It was expected. Toys didn't poison our kids. Medicine didn't make us sick. It made us well. We could buy something with our credit card and not worry about our identity being stolen.
As the Gallup Poll showed, small business still enjoys Americans' trust. Only one in four people trusts TV news. Only 14% trust Congress. But 59% of Americans trust you. Whatever you do, don't violate that trust.
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