A WELCOME NOTE FROM THE AUTHORS

Why The Decency Code Will Matter to You

We’d like to take a moment to introduce you to The Decency Code and tell you why it will matter in your life. Why did you pick up this book, whether you’re at a bookstore or you found in it in a library or someone shared it with you? We’re guessing your questions are something like these five:

1.   Can this book answer the questions I have, see, hear, or think about with respect to decency, civility, and integrity?

2.   Can this book answer the questions that bother most of us about why there is such a decency denial and deficit in America and in the world today?

3.   How do I bring my own personal views and decency, civility, and integrity habits from my personal and family life into my working and professional life?

4.   How can I help reduce the contention and controversy that seems to grow everywhere?

5.   Can this book help me and those I care about have happier lives and more satisfying careers?

The Decency Code is a book that answers these questions and much more.

Just take a dip into any chapter. We believe you will find some important answers and perhaps even more important questions that need to be answered as you learn more about The Decency Code.

In the past few years civility, integrity, and decency have been turned upside down and are now even more essential to discuss and explore. As we envisioned this book, beginning around 2009, we questioned ourselves with increasing intensity:

Why does any book about decency, civility, and integrity matter?

How is another book going to contribute to the growing public conversation of decency, civility, and integrity?

Can any book arm an individual against indecency, incivility, and phoniness?

As the book evolved, its purpose, value, and need became more evident to us as authors, and we hope it will for you too, as the reader, learner, and practitioner of The Decency Code.

Here are the perspectives we are coming from:

1.   The Decency Code provides many pathways to respect, civility, and integrity. The most powerful pathways include accountability, civility, compassion, empathy, honesty, humility, and principle.

2.   But there are even more pathways: apology, candor, character, destiny management (yours), dignity, empathy, engagement, forgiveness, honesty, openness, responsiveness, transparency, and truthfulness.

3.   The Decency Code defines decency from different, relevant perspectives.

4.   The Decency Code helps explain which barriers to decencies are hard to overcome: accountability vs. doing whatever it takes; civility vs. callousness and confrontation; compassion vs. indifference and suspicion; empathy vs. apathy and carelessness; honesty vs. culpability and silence; humility vs. arrogance and overbearance; and principle vs. insidious unethical behavior.

5.   The Decency Code provides and provokes lessons you can apply to your daily life at work and home.

6.   This is a book your boss can use (and you, if you’re the boss) to move your organization more deeply into the concepts of civility, decency, and integrity, the three overriding components of The Decency Code.

Our goal for this book, and the conversations we hope it will trigger, is to answer these and other questions on every single page. As we wrote the book, our principal question was, “What questions does this page answer?” or “What questions on this page need to be answered?” or “What questions can only be answered by the reader, user, and practitioner of The Decency Code?”

We hope you’ll join us.

Steve Harrison—New York

James E. Lukaszewski—Minneapolis
America’s Crisis Guru^®

January 2020