Proverbs (Finally)

I was starting to get confused. I enjoyed the reading on wisdom, but I was starting to wonder where the familiar proverbs were, the ones I described a couple of days ago. NOW we get to them, beginning with Chapter 10. These are the couplets we're all familiar with, the first line telling us what to do, and the second what to refrain from. 

The one that resonates with me is Proverbs 10:9, which states:

Whoever walks in integrity walks securely,
   but whoever takes crooked paths will be found out. 

This takes me back to when I was obtaining my MBA, which was from 1998-2001. At that time, we studied many cases where various forms of mis-, mal- and non-feasance were  occurring, and companies like Enron, WorldCom, Global Crossing and Tyco were setting new standards of corporate misbehavior. Politicians were upset, and eventually passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in 2002 that instituted new reporting rules for publicly traded companies. Whenever something really dramatic like the collapse of Enron occurs, the first assumption is that it was a regulatory failure which requires more regulation.

I've never been a fan of this kind of thinking, and Solomon's proverb is the main reason why. Whenever anything in this world, be it a company, a corrupt leader or whatever, decides to take shortcuts, it's not a matter of if they'll be caught as opposed to WHEN. I don't want to underplay the devastation Enron caused both internally and externally, but Enron took the crooked path--and they were found out and punished.

There was an ethics class offered as an elective for my MBA program, but I didn't take it. Right after I received my MBA, there was a strong move nationwide toward making ethics classes mandatory, and again, I'm not a fan. Learning ethics is light-years removed from LIVING ethics, and this simple verse tells us all we need to know to get through all aspects of life--walk in integrity, knowing full well that if you don't, you WILL get caught.