“Well, it’s no trick to make a lot of money, if all you want is to make a lot of money.”

    So said Mr. Bernstein about Charles Foster Kane in Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, written by Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz. Kane lost everything he held dear—his friends, his family, and his self-respect—because accumulating wealth was more important to him than integrity.

    I’m reminded of Bernstein’s observation in light of the latest corporate scandal, this one involving the Japanese business colossus Toshiba. As Geoffrey Smith reported in Fortune this week, Toshiba’s CEO and president Hisao Tanaka resigned after investigators discovered that since 2008 the company had intentionally overstated its profits by a factor of three. Smith quotes the investigator’s disturbing report: “Toshiba had a corporate culture in which management decisions could not be challenged … Employees were pressured into inappropriate accounting by postponing loss reports or moving certain costs into later years.”

    At its core, the Toshiba scandal is about the failure to take character seriously in the workforce. But it’s not too late for Toshiba to, as my high school band director Melvin Meads used to tell me, “straighten up and fly right.” Your own organization would do well to heed the following three guidelines for avoiding a Toshiba-like mess.

    1. Hire for character.

    Employers generally look at two areas in a job candidate’s profile: knowledge and skill. Toshiba is no different in this regard. Take a look at the job listings on the company’s website, and you’ll see plenty of examples of this.

    I selected one at random: sales representative. No one can deny that sales reps need to know something about business and be able to communicate effectively. But judging by the job description, these qualities appear to be all that one needs to do the job well.

    That’s not true, however. A good sales agent, in the deepest, most meaningful sense of “good,” is also honest, accountable, and courageous. In other words, he or she is a person of high character.

    Would you really want your sales team to be made up of men and women with great communication skills and superior business acumen but who were also dishonest, irresponsible, and unwilling to stand up to a corrupt client? Of course not. Why, then, aren’t honesty, accountability, and courage listed in the job description?

    And it’s not only sales reps who ought to be people of integrity. The same applies at every level of the organization. Without scrupulous regard to character, companies run the risk of hiring candidates who are solely driven, like Charles Foster Kane, by the bottom line. And that’s exactly the kind of thinking that got Toshiba intro trouble.

    Focusing obsessively on knowledge and skills is a problem in most companies in every field. Taking character as well as competence into account is one way to hire better people.

    2. Promote for character.

    Last fall I consulted with a Fortune 100 company, and a lunchtime presentation by the CEO left me awestruck. He introduced five employees who had demonstrated high character in one way or another. A young man whom I’ll call Emiliano had found a diamond ring worth $15,000 in the store’s parking lot. He spent a considerable amount of time tracking down its owner, who was beside herself with joy upon getting the ring returned.

    Emiliano’s humility, a trait I discussed in an earlier Fortune column about Taylor Swift, was especially touching. “I was just doing my job,” he told a packed auditorium. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one in that room who thought, “I want to be like that guy.”

    Emiliano received a prestigious award, a bonus, and a standing ovation from his peers. The CEO makes sure that employees see how important honest and humble people are to the success of the business. You can bet that Emiliano is on the fast track at that company for a promotion.

    Imagine if Toshiba—and your organization too?—paid this kind of attention to the character of its employees when making decisions about who to promote.

    “赚大钱没什么窍门，只要你一门心思就想着这件事，你就能赚大钱。”

    在奥逊·威尔斯担任导演、威尔斯和赫尔曼·J·曼凯维奇担任编剧的电影《公民凯恩》中，剧中人伯恩斯坦这样评价查尔斯·福斯特·凯恩。凯恩失去了所有自己珍视的东西——朋友、家庭和自尊，因为对他来说，积累财富比诚信更重要。

    东芝的丑闻让我想起了伯恩斯坦的这句话。调查机构发现，2008年以来该公司将利润虚增了三倍，东芝公司CEO兼社长田中久雄随即辞职。《财富》上周的相关报道中引述了调查机构出具的报告，内容令人震惊，其中写道：“东芝的公司文化是不能质疑管理层的决定……员工被迫采取不当的记账方法，比如推迟披露亏损，或将某些成本项目计入随后几年的账目中。”

    究其根本，东芝出现丑闻的原因是没有把人品当成重要的职场问题认真对待。但就像我中学时的乐队指挥告诉过我的那样，“拨乱反正”对东芝来说不算太晚。要想让你的公司避免陷入东芝那样的境地，只要遵循下列三条指南。

    1. 依品行招人。

    公司招人时一般会从两方面考察应聘者，那就是知识和技能。在这方面，东芝和其他企业别无二致。看看它网站上的招聘广告，就会发现这样的例子不胜枚举。

    我在上面随便找了一条，招聘的是销售代表。无可否认，销售代表需要对业务有所了解，而且能进行有效地沟通。但从其中的职位描述来看，似乎只要具备这些条件就能做好这份工作。

    但情况并非如此。就“好”的最深刻、最重要的涵义而言，一位好的销售代表还要诚实、可靠而且勇敢。换句话说就是应该品格高尚。

    大家真的希望自己的销售团队成员都是些极其善于沟通，业务敏感性高人一筹，但不诚实、不负责任、不愿和“坏”客户针锋相对的人吗？当然不想。那么，招聘广告中为什么没有把诚实、可靠和勇敢列为应聘条件呢？

    同时，应当讲诚信的不光是销售代表。企业各个层面上的人员都应如此。如果在品格方面没有原则，公司就有可能聘用像查尔斯·福斯特·凯恩那样纯粹受利润驱使的人。正是这样的思维给东芝带来了麻烦。

    在各个领域，大多数公司都存在过分关注知识和技能的问题。把品格和才干同时纳入考虑范围是招到更出色员工的途径之一。

    2. 依品行提拔人。

    去年秋天，我曾为一家《财富》100强公司提供咨询服务。该公司首席执行官在午餐会上的讲话让我肃然起敬。他介绍了五名以这样或那样的方式展现出良好品质的员工。其中一位年轻人，姑且称他为埃米利亚诺，在该公司门店的停车场发现了一枚价值1.5万美元的钻戒。他花了很长时间来寻找失主，后者发现钻戒失而复得时欣喜若狂。

    埃米利亚诺的谦逊尤其令人感动。我在之前谈及泰勒·斯威夫特的《财富》专栏文章中曾提到过这种品质。埃米利亚诺在人头攒动的会场中对大家说：“我只是做了自己的工作。”我相信，会场里不止我一个人在想“我应该像他一样。”

    埃米利亚诺赢得了盛赞，拿到了奖金，同事们起立为他鼓掌欢呼。这位CEO确实让员工看到了诚实和谦逊的人对该公司的成功有多么重要。可以相信，埃米利亚诺会迅速得到提拔。

    想象一下，如果东芝（以及你的公司）在决定晋升哪些员工时像这家公司一样考虑员工的品质，情况会怎么样呢？

    3. Fire for character.

    Jenn Lim is the CEO of Delivering Happiness, a company she founded with Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh. She shows business leaders around the world about how to build successful teams, and I was fortunate to hear her moving speech earlier this week at the annual convention of the National Speakers Association. “Hire slowly, fire quickly,” Lim advises, and adds that both activities should be based on the company’s values.

    But as Toshiba’s recent history demonstrates, sometimes a company’s values are dishonorable.

    One value that is essential for the long-term success of any organization is honesty.

    In the early ’90s, I took a weeklong leadership seminar at the Gallup Institute in Lincoln, Nebraska. Its owner at the time, the late, great Donald O. Clifton (whose protégées include Tom Rath and Marcus Buckingham), told my class that Gallup fires an employee who fudges data, even if that employee has done this only once.

    Isn’t this response rather harsh?

    Alan Murray, Fortune’s editor, doesn’t think so. A company’s greatest asset, he told me, is the trust that people have in it, so “anything that has the potential to damage that public trust is an existential threat to the center’s work.”

    “When you think about what makes brands powerful,” he continued, “it’s all about trust. The public has a certain understanding that what they’re getting when they see that brand is something they can count on … I see maintaining the public’s trust as my highest purpose.”

    Dishonesty in an employee is a death knell in every field, not just business. Jay Townsend, a political consultant and the author of The 10 Worst Mistakes Candidates Make, says that people who embellish their resumes set themselves up for a nasty fall.

    “I worked on a race in Kentucky once and reviewed the resume of one of the candidates who was running for U.S. Congress” Jay told me via Skype Friday morning. “He was a sitting state senator, and he said he’d graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy with both an undergraduate and a master’s degree in computer science. When I called the Academy to verify this, I was told, ‘I’m sorry, sir, but this person never graduated from here. He was here for one semester and dropped out. We don’t even offer a master’s degree in computer science.’”

    “The man had been lying for years,” Jay said. “When voters learned that, he was cooked. He was running as a Republican in one of the most Republican districts in the country. He lost, and it wasn’t even close. ”

    Just as it’s a mistake to look only at a job candidate’s knowledge and skill when making hiring or promoting decisions, it’s also wrong to fire employees only because their performance is lacking. The citizens of Kentucky essentially fired a government official for lying. How might Toshiba have avoided its current problems if it had gotten rid of the dishonest people in its midst (including its CEO) earlier?

    But wait—there’s more!

    It’s easy say that smart companies should hire, promote, and fire for character as well as knowledge and skill. What does this mean, however, in practical terms?

    In future columns for Fortune’s leadership channel, we’ll look at 10 qualities that high-character employees possess and how companies can determine the degree to which job candidates and current employees possess these qualities.

    Stay tuned!

    Bruce Weinstein, The Ethics Guy, is a keynote speaker and corporate trainer in ethics, leadership, and character, and his latest book is The Good Ones: Ten Crucial Qualities of High-Character Employees.

    3. 依品行解雇人。

    詹·利姆和美捷步网站首席执行官谢家华共同创立了旨在传播幸福生活理念的公司Delivering Happiness（deliveringhappiness.com）并担任CEO。她向全世界的企业负责人展示了如何构建一个成功的团队。上周早些时候，我有幸在美国演说家协会的年会上聆听了她的感人演说。利姆建议：“招人要慢，炒人要快”。她还说，这两项工作都应该以公司的价值观为基础。

    不过，从东芝近况就能看出，公司价值观有时并不光彩。

    对任何企业来说，长期成功的关键价值之一就是诚实。

    20世纪90年代初，我在内布拉斯加州林肯市的盖洛普研究所参加了为期一周的管理研讨会。当时该研究所的拥有者、已故的伟大人物唐纳德·克里夫顿（继承克里夫顿衣钵的包括同为作家兼学者的汤姆·拉斯和马库斯·白金汉）在我们的研讨班上说，盖洛普开除了一名编造数据的员工，尽管后者只这样做了一次。

    这样的反应是否太过严厉了呢？

    《财富》主编艾伦·莫里觉得这样做并不过分。他对我说，企业最宝贵的资产就是人们的信任，所以“任何有可能让它失去公众信任的东西对盖洛普的工作都是生死攸关的威胁。”

    莫里说：“想一想，是什么让品牌那么有力量，就是信任。看到这些品牌时，大家就会觉得自己能得到可靠的东西……我就把维护公信力作为自己的最高目标。”

    不光是企业，员工不诚实在任何领域都会导致失败。政治顾问、《候选人的十大最严重失误》（The 10 Worst Mistakes Candidates Make）一书的作者杰伊·汤森德指出，在履历中添油加醋的人都为自己栽大跟头埋下了伏笔。

    上周五上午，杰伊在Skype上对我说：“我在肯塔基州参加竞选工作时看到了一位国会议员候选人的简历。当时他是州参议员，自称毕业于美国海军学院，拿到了计算机科学学士和硕士学位。我打电话向该学院求证此事，对方却回答说‘对不起，先生，这个人不是我们的毕业生。他在这儿上过一个学期，然后就退学了。而且我们的计算机系根本就没有开研究生课程。’”

    杰伊说：“这个人多年来一直在说瞎话。此事被选民发现搞得他焦头烂额。他是共和党，那儿是共和党支持率最高的地区之一，但他却落选了，而且输的不是一点半点。”

    只关注应聘者的知识和技能是错误做法，同样的，仅仅因为没有业绩而开除员工也不对。肯塔基州的民众让一位公务员下岗的原因实际上是说谎。如果早开除了那些不诚实的人（包括CEO），东芝也许就不会有现在这些麻烦了吧？

    请大家稍等，我再补充两句。

    明智的公司在招人、提拔人和开除人的时候不光要看知识和技能，还要看品行，这说起来很容易。但在实际操作中它意味着什么呢？

    在今后的专栏文章中，《财富》杂志管理栏目将探讨品格优秀的员工具有的十种品质，以及企业如何判断求职者和员工有多少这样的品质。

    敬请继续关注！（财富中文网）

    本文作者布鲁斯·韦恩斯坦有“伦理者”之称（他的网站是www.theethicsguy.com），他是一位主题演讲人和企业伦理、管理以及品格培训师。他的最新著作是《那些好人：品格高尚员工的十大品质》。

    译者：Charlie

    校对：詹妮