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As I often do, I received an e-mail today from a well-meaning soul warning me about a particularly dangerous internet virus. As an act of Everyday Stewardship I DON”T immediately pass them along to anyone else. I first verify their accuracy.

I do this for as a matter of personal, relationship and collective integrity.

On the level of integrity with myself (personal integrity), only passing along information I have done my best to verify the credibility of is partly about self-respect. I don’t like myself when I am irresponsible.

On the level of relationship integrity, people’s lives are hectic and stressful enough without being sent unnecessary causes for concern. Forward to others these kinds of warnings before making certain they are accurate is asking those we care about to spend unnecessary time and experience unneeded stress.

On the level of collective integrity, all of us are already bathed in a culture of fear. Passing along items such as these before verifying them adds a totally unnecessary layer of fear to this climate. I believe this is a disservice to collective highest good. That is what makes this an opportunity to fulfill our roles as Everyday Stewards.
Verification of internet scams is simple to do, takes only a moment, and is, I believe, a matter of integrity and social responsibility in the Internet age. Verification involves a quick visit to one of the many reputable scam-monitoring websites. I most commonly start my research on either the Snopes website (www.snopes.com) or the Scam Busters website (www.scambusters.org). I simply enter the name of the alert and, voila, information comes up about whether that item is true, partly true or a lie. (You can find additional scam monitoring sites by Googling “internet scams” and “internet fraud.”

You can also simply Google the name of the alert item and then add the word “hoax” or “scam.”)

As an act of Everyday Stewardship, check all alerts to see if they are hoaxes before forwarding them to those you care about. Just because the person forwarded an alert to you is well-intended don’t blindly assume that that this means they have done their homework before forwarding the alert. Check yourself!

The same goes for supposed “news stories,” “commentaries” or “secret information,” especially items allegedly written by people whose credibility you trust, or forwarded to you by someone you trust. Agreeing or disagreeing with the information you receive does not always mean that it is true or accurate. This is a matter of discernment.

For more about discernment and becoming a better Everyday Steward, read my book, The New IQ: How Integrity Intelligence Serves Us All. It will be released in January 2008. In the meantime, sign up for my free sneak preview eCourse about the book by going to www.willingness.com, clicking on “Freebies” and then clicking on “Free eCourses.” Or, click here to go there directly.

Continuing his dedication to refusing to tolerate yet another example of lack of integrity, Roger Goodell, the head of the National Football League, fined New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick a record half million dollars for defying NFL rules by spying on his opponent’s coaches during a football game. This is the maximum financial fine Goodell is authorized to levee. He also fined the New England Patriots organization and additional quarter-million dollars. And he took away one of their draft picks in next year’s draft. Bravo, Roger Goodell.

Suspending Belichick for a game or two might have sent an even stronger message but I am still glad that action was considered, swift and decisive. It of course remains to be seen whether Goodell will go so far as to initiate an investigation into whether this spying was an isolated incident or a more regular habit. Nonetheless, Goodell’s actions are role-modeling not only to fellow professional sports leagues, but to all those involved in amateur athletics and child athletics, how crucial it is to preserve integrity in all forms of competition. This role-modeling sends a great message to organizers of child athletic leagues, to team coaches, to the children who play and to their parents.

Too bad someone doesn’t have this kind of power to discipline politicians, political pundits and lobbyists!

In yet another example of how leaders, political pundits and many others are helping to crush the public’s capacity to discern fact from spin, President Bush role-modeled this very problem during his speech last night. For the facts, click here:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20766644

If this practice were a one-time aberration, or if only a few people did it, well… there are always a few rotten apples. But, it is being role-modeled every day in every way by far too many political, business and even some religious leaders, by lobbyists, by media pundits and talk radio hosts, and by everyday people across the political and ideological spectrum. After all, if so many leaders do it, it must be okay, right?

The truth is that is practice of making it impossible to distinguish supposed facts from actual spin clouds everyone’s capacity for discernment. This widespread practice renders even the most well-meaning people unable to make informed decisions despite their best intentions. This example of widespread lack of integrity undermines the very foundation of democracy and free society.

It is time for people across the political, ideological and advocacy spectrum to start insisting to the leaders, advocates and commentators that they support cease this practice once and for all. We need to focus less on attacking the “other side” for doing this and focus more on using our power where it can be felt, through insisting that “our side” stop doing this.

Michael Vick is the now-indefinitely suspended Atlanta Falcons NFL quarterback who pleaded guilty earlier this week to charges related to funding the ugly and cruel business of dog-fighting matches and then gambling on the outcomes of the matches. He provides a particularly chilling and painful example of lack of two forms of integrity: Collective Integrity and Leadership Integrity.

By way of background, when most people think of integrity, they tend to focus most on Relationship Integrity. The most talked-about aspect of Relationship Integrity has to do with saying what we mean and meaning what we say. This includes making commitments we actually complete, keeping others informed in a timely way when our commitments need to change, and taking responsibility for consequences when we don’t follow through on a commitment or we don’t re-negotiate it in a timely way if it needs to change. There are more aspects of Relationship Integrity than this. I cover them in my book The New IQ: How Integrity Intelligence Serves You, Your Relationships and Our World, to be released in January 2008.

In addition to Relationship Integrity, there are three other aspects of integrity: Personal Integrity, Collective Integrity and Leadership Integrity. I cover all of these as well in The New IQ. Personal Integrity is about being whole and complete, which on a practical level begins with proper self-care rather than self-neglect or self-indulgence. It also includes more than that. In The New IQ I translate being “whole and complete” from a vague philosophical concept into specific day-to-day behaviors so that this aspect of integrity becomes do-able and useful.

Michael Vick illustrates being out of integrity with the other two aspects of integrity. He serves us all in a backhanded way, however, through providing an example of the kind of huge damage that is caused by lack of Collective and Leadership Integrity. It is these to aspects of integrity that I will feature in this post.

Vick was a leader, not simply of his Atlanta Falcons professional football team, but in a far more fundamental way that every single one of us is a leader: he was a role-model. It does not matter what a professional athlete thinks about whether or not s/he should be seen as a role-model. For instance, professional athletes have no control over the fact that they are looked up to by many children (and others too). The “what is” is that they are. Their choice to become professional athletes is their choice to decide what kind of relationship they will have with the fact that they will be seen as role-models. Vick’s abdication of Leadership Integrity harms children’s ability to look up to professional athletes. Beyond that, whether he likes it or not, Vick role-modeled awful things about males, professional athletes, and blacks. And this is just for starters!

Vick’s abdication of Leadership Integrity is also an abdication of Collective Integrity. A crucial aspect of integrity has to do with serving the highest good of the collectives of which we are a part. That is what Collective Integrity is all about. For starters, Vick is part of the following collectives: humanity, males, Americans, blacks, athletes and professional football players, and his own Atlanta Falcons team. Let us take a closer look at two of these aspects of Collective Integrity.
At the level of Collective Integrity with humanity, Vick abdicated our responsibility as members of humanity to be stewards of our planet. As part of this we have a responsibility to treat other creatures (in Vick’s case dogs) with honor and respect. Vick’s guilty plea indicates that he funded cruelty (dog fights) and also bankrolled betting on which dog could damage the other dog more (gambling). This dishonors and disrespects these creatures. Absolutely no version of collective highest good is being served by this.

At the level of Collective Integrity with his own Atlanta Falcons football team, Michael Vick abdicated his responsibility to his team. By making his own interest in harming dogs and gambling on dog fights more important than the team he led as its quarterback, he let down his team members and the owners of the team who invested a huge amount of money in an incredibly financially lucrative contact. He basically said to them that his self-centered desire to do what he wanted to do was more important than the horrible repercussions his being caught would cause to the Atlanta Falcons.

This is, to me, a classic example of one of the cornerstones of lack of Collective Integrity that has reached epidemic proportions in our world: entitlement. Vick appears to me to have believed that he was entitled to get away with breaking United States law as well as the ethics policies of the National Football League. He appears to me to have believed that those laws and ethics policies did not apply to him; that his super-star status should exempt him from having to obey them. I don’t know this for sure because I have no idea what inner motivations led to his choices. This is just what his behaviors imply to me.

What I do know is that Michael Vick is not a victim. He is an adult who made out-of-integrity choices and is responsible for the results his choices led to. Vick is now beginning to experience those consequences. At least he did not pull the all-too-popular stunt that so many try to pull these days: pleading innocent to what they know they are guilty of in order to escape having to experience the natural consequences of their choices to live out of integrity.

I applaud Michael Vick for taking this first step in bringing himself back into integrity. I believe he has many more steps to take before his journey back into integrity regarding this particular incident is complete. But that is another story for another time.

I also applaud Roger Goodell, the Commissioner of the NFL, for placing Vick on indefinite suspension (as of this posting) as a consequence of Vick’s actions. Goodell, in my opinion, has been taking vitally important steps during this past year toward restoring the integrity of the NFL through enforcing its own ethics and code-of-conduct policies. (I applaud his actions in The New IQ as well.) I hope this post makes it into Goodell’s hands because I would love to provide an Integrity Intelligence training program for NFL rookies as part of the life skills training the NFL so wisely offers them!

Here is a story straight from the news providing an example of a prosecutor’s political aspirations being more important than his integrity.  This fellow seems to have made his desire to be elected to a higher office more important than whether he wreck the lives of innocent people.  It cost him not only his position but his right to practice as an attorney.  Yet, still he would not take full responsibility for what he did.  Read for yourself from the following excerpts (for the complete story, go to
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070617/ap_on_re_us/duke_lacrosse_94;_ylt=AsXojDh40yiYM3nf.q_cxbJlM3wV):