Intentional Integrity: How Smart Companies Can Lead an Ethical Revolution

Anyone who reads the news will be familiar with the seemingly endless lapses in integrity that occur at companies, both those well-established and start-ups. In this work, Chesnut (CEO, Airbnb) shares his method for safeguarding organizations against these lapses and thus avoiding the negative effects on customer loyalty (and the bottom line) and recruiting and retaining talented staff. He boils his method down to six steps—the six C’s—through which organizations can establish a clear set of values and ensure that everyone adheres to them, including obvious buy-in and behavior modeling from those at the top (the first C is for “CEO”). Other key elements include a robust and continuous system for communicating and reinforcing these values and a barrier- and stigma-free system for reporting lapses paired with a clear set of consequences that are equitably and routinely enforced. To emphasize his points, Chesnut liberally mixes in examples taken from his experiences at eBay and Airbnb.