Leadership’s Future: National Honesty Day

Today is National Honesty Day. Look it up and you’ll find lot of talk about being honest today.

You’d think people could manage one honest day a year, but it’s doubtful they actually will.

These days honesty seems to be more a matter of convenience, i.e., telling the truth when it doesn’t get in the way to whatever the agenda is, or bending the truth to further whatever—and it gets more acceptable every day.

In schools, honesty is considered quaint.

And it’s a global problem, “A 2006 study of cheating among US graduates, published in the journal Academy of Management Learning & Education, found that 56% of all MBA students cheated regularly – more than in any other discipline.”

Carolyn Y. Woo, Dean of Notre Dame Mendoza College of Business says, “I believe that our current crisis is caused by a failure of values fuelled by perverse incentives, which trumped sound judgment and overwhelmed regulatory enforcements.”

At all ages and all levels it seems to boil down to ‘dishonesty pays’.

Of course, I could be out of touch and cheating has been exempted from dishonesty and moved to a category all its own, but I think I would have read about that. But even if it has there’s plenty of other dishonesty going around these days.

Back to today’s holiday.

Even if every person on the planet was totally honest today it wouldn’t solve anything.

We don’t need one day of honesty and 364 days of the other stuff, so here’s my idea.

Let’s cancel National Honesty Day and starting in 2010 celebrate National Dishonesty Day instead.

That way, we can all be honest 364 days of the year and lie, cheat and steal to our hearts content every April 30.

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Image credit: MissTurner on flickr