You carve out the organization's character through your daily choices. You shape its conscience as you exercise your own.

High personal standards aren't enough for organizational excellence. You've got to be intolerant of low standards in others. . . . If you accommodate questionable practices in others who touch your organization, you risk soiling its reputation. Anybody whose hands aren't clean can get the place dirty.

Excellence is a process, not just an outcome. Sure, we have to hold out for high standards in the products or services we provide. The goods must be more than "good enough." But so must our approach - you know, our methodology, the way we do business and deal with people. How could the ends be considered excellent if we can't be proud of the means?

You carve out the organization's character through your daily choices. You shape its conscience as you exercise your own.

Optimism is a much more enabling mindset than hard-core realism, and it's far superior to pessimism...[because] Hope helps move us in the direction of our goals and ambitions.

How can we be trusted with big things if we're not trustworthy with things that are small? Don't allow your finer instincts to become a casualty of the little everyday crimes of ethical compromise.

But when we get enough people who don't care, and who don't accept personal responsibility for high ethical standards, our organization gets the "M" disease. Mediocrity. Anybody in the place can be a carrier. By the same token, every individual can carry the cure: the ethics of excellence.