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Tavis: We continue our 'Road to Wealth' series tonight with Dr. Henry Cloud. He's a clinical psychologist and best-selling author whose book 'Boundaries' sold over a million copies. His latest is titled 'Integrity, The Courage to Meet the Demands of Reality.' The book is a collection of essential qualities, six, in fact, that he says determine your success in business. Dr. Cloud, nice to have you on the program.

Dr. Henry Cloud: Good to be here.

Tavis: Glad to have you on the program. Let me start by asking, clinical psychologist. Tell me how you think that makes your advice different for those of us trying to succeed in business than the folk in the world writing books who are actually in the business world.

Cloud: Right, it's sort of like the shrink version.

Tavis: Yeah, exactly. You said it, I didn't.

Cloud: (Laugh) Well, it's interesting. When I first went into practice, I was working in an organizational consulting firm. And what they did mostly was leadership consulting with pretty high level leaders. And every now and then, one of those people would have some kind of growth step they needed to take, and they would refer them to me.

And so, I wasn't a leadership specialist, but I worked in the context of listening to leaders for 20 years. And so in that, I started to see the issues, and then started doing a lot of corporate consulting.

Tavis: Yeah. I wanna ask what integrity is, and I ask that against the backdrop of the fact, at least, that everywhere you look, you seem to see less and less of it, whatever it is. Whatever you're gonna tell me it is, I'm not seeing it at Enron. I'm seeing less of it in the United States Congress. So whether it's business, politics, from Tom DeLay to Jack Abramoff to Enron to WorldCom. The list goes on and on and on. So whatever it is, tell me what it is and why I'm seeing so little of it these days.

Cloud: Yeah. Well, it's interesting. It's simple to oversimplify it. And a lot of times, we will define integrity as just honesty or ethics. If someone has integrity, we can believe the numbers. But when you follow people around, especially in the corporate sector or even in government, I think it's got to be defined more comprehensively than that.

Because you can have somebody who's honest, but lacks other aspects of their makeup, which really get in the way. They can be honest and run over people or control people or make a horrible work environment, or you can't trust them in other ways, or they're manipulative. And so, I like to think of integrity as actually the way the word is defined or where it comes from. To have integrity means that you're integrated, undivided, and whole. So all the different parts of you are working well.

Tavis: We are born with this thing? We develop this thing? If you lose it, do we get it back? How does that work?

Cloud: It's kind of all of the above. We're born, I think, and this gets into a lot of philosophy that everybody's got an opinion on. But one of the things we do know about humans is that we're born with the capacity and the potential to be both good and bad, both mature or immature. And there are a lot of factors that shape people.

But by and large, what we're talking about is the degree to which somebody can be one person. We don't have integrity when there's a part of us that's compartmentalized. So if I'm one way with you, and I've got this kind of other life going on, then there's a divide and that other way of being, or that other life, tends to cross over the fence and screw up my real life.

Tavis: What have you discovered in your years of work that most challenges our integrity, specifically in the workplace, in business? What most challenges this notion of integrity that you've just shared with me?

Cloud: I think the thing that most challenges it is, and these are a lot of good people, too. What we define as a basically good person. They have relational weaknesses. Like, it's difficult for them to confront somebody. It's oftentimes difficult for a leader, I've got a lot of stories in the book, of, of CEOs, even, who can't deal with the problem person on the team, because he or she has gotten dependent on that person's performance.

So I'm afraid to confront this person or to fire this person or to discipline this person, and it's dividing the whole team, 'cause everybody else wants the leader to stand up and do something about it. And while the person may be honest, they don't have full integrity in their dealings with people. And that starts to affect the whole culture. And so, I think our relational fears, our relational dependencies, are some of the biggest kind of roadblocks to integrity.

Tavis: You know what I thought you were gonna say? Greed.

Cloud: Greed?

Tavis: And I think if you, just like I've done some poll, I haven't. But I would have bet you money a moment ago that you would have said greed, born in part of the fact I think that if you talk to the American people, certainly, I think, a decent percentage of them would said, where we see a lack of integrity in politics, in business, and the like, it always seems to be connected not to relational issues that you describe, but somebody got greedy for something. Greedy for power, greedy for money, greedy for whatever it might have, but greed always seems to be at the center of it.

Cloud: Well, it actually does. And if you define it that way or ask it that way, we could probably say quantitatively, greed is kind of this subset of basic self-centeredness. One of the things I talk about in the book is that integrity happens when somebody has a transcendent value that they realize that whatever they're working on, it's about something larger than themselves.

The greedy person thinks the world exists basically to feed them. If you take the huge corporate scandals of recent times, if the people and the leaders and the CEOs thought that they were there to serve the bigger picture, to serve the stockholders, to serve the company, to serve the organization, to serve the customers, then they act in a certain way which actually benefits them in the end.

But you've got a handful of people who allegedly tried to get the big picture to serve their own greed, as you're saying. And the big picture was supposed to bend, and we'll do off balance sheet deals, or cover this, or whatever, so my stock portfolio goes up, and they end up bringing the whole thing down. So I think greed may be the most obvious, and it may be quantitatively the one we see the most.

But when you ask, "What is the most difficult one?," I think greedy people don't have a difficult time. I think they're just out for themselves, and they don't find themselves in conflict. But the difficult one, like I said earlier, is sort of like basically for the good person who finds themselves maybe working under a leader like that, and they wanna be the whistleblower.

But they find themselves in a conflict, because of their relational fears. They're afraid to confront, or they need the job. And that's when integrity begins to crack sometimes.

Tavis: Let me jump, then, to some of these essential qualities that you say determine our success in business. I don't have time to get to all six of them, but let me go where we can here. One of the first ones that you lay out in the book is to connect with other people, to the point you're making now, connect with other people and build trust.

Cloud: We often think of trust as just is somebody lying to me or not? But there are a lot of honest people who don't lie, but what they can't do, and don't do well, is get into the experience and the reality of the people that they're dealing with. Great story in the book, about two or three years ago, if you looked at the cover of 'Business Week' magazine, Michael Dell's picture.

It says, the new Dell. And there's a whole article about, at one point, they did an anonymous survey, and over 50 percent of the company said anonymously they would leave tomorrow, given another offer. If you're running a $50 billion company and half your workforce can leave, you got a problem. Well, what they traced it back to is they said that he and his President Rollins were emotionally and relationally difficult and not connecting and aloof.

And Dell goes in front of the whole company and says, I'm shy, and I realize that that's created this distance, and the high expectations is a problem. And I'm gonna make a commitment to do it better. Well, what did he do there? First of all, the absence of connection causes a cultural problem. But ultimately, he connected with what they were telling him.

He didn't explain it away, he didn't get defensive. He connected with it. He makes a DVD of the thing, sends it to all the managers around the world, and starts to turn it around. And whether it's your customers, the people you lead, your bosses, your team, ultimately, business is based on trust. And we build trust by being able to not try to get you to see my reality only, but I gotta get into yours and know what it's like to be you, and what you need. And what it's like to be on the other end of me, and how we make this work.

Tavis: You argue as one of these six that we have to learn to embrace the negative. That's (laugh) a lot easier said than done.

Cloud: Sitting here in Hollywood, and there's a lot of cosmetic surgery to keep that from happening, right?

Tavis: Yeah.

Cloud: Yeah. We all have this sort of conflict inside where we know the ideal. We know, I know what I wish you were, you know what you wish I were. And when we get into the real work, we don't reach the ideal. We run into problems. I did a deal with a hospital group one time where I walked into the war room, and there's a big banner across the wall.

And it said, no problems, no profit. And what they were trying to orient their teams to was that business is about solving problems. Now, you got some people in business, if there's a negative situation, blood pressure goes up, they can't function, they feel like a loser, or they get combative. As opposed to seeing negative realities as that's part of the deal.

And the people who can negotiate those, interpersonally, if we got a problem in a relationship in business, I need to be able to embrace that and say look, we got an issue. Or if there's a problem in the market or a problem in performance, to the degree that we can't embrace those and we avoid them. And you got a lot of leaders out there, they don't wanna hear the bad news. And it's three or four versions of the product down the line before the bad news overtakes them, 'cause they didn't listen in the beginning.

Tavis: Well, we're just scratching...

Cloud: Tiger Woods is a great example I put in the book.

Tavis: Yeah, please, go ahead, right quick.

Cloud: He's 20 years old, or 21, he goes on the tour, Nike and everybody else gives him 50 to $100 million. He's never played in a tournament. Enters the Masters, wins it first time out. Wins it; 12 shots.

Tavis: By 12 strokes. Absolutely, sure.

Cloud: Right? What did he do? He calls a teacher the next week and he says, "I will never reach my goals if I don't face my problems.' And last week at Augusta, I saw my glaring problems. Now, we'd love to have those problems, right? So what does he do? He goes and dissembles his whole golf swing, because he knows to reach his potential, he's gotta embrace the negative, the weaknesses.

Tavis: It messed him up for a while, though.

Cloud: A year and a half, he goes into the tank. And everybody says he's a flash in the pan, he wasn't as good as we thought. A year and a half later, what does he do? Wins the first seven or eight tournaments of the year, and then he wins four majors in 12 months. Embrace your negatives. They stand between you and the goal.

Tavis: Well, I'm out of time, but I'm happy to know that I'm in this conversation, reaffirming that I'm about to be rich. Because if problems lead to profit, I'm gonna be all right. (Laugh) 'Cause I got a few of those. I'm glad to have you on.

Cloud: Good to be here.

Tavis: Nice to have you. The book by Dr. Henry Cloud is 'Integrity, The Courage to Meet the Demands of Reality, How Six Essential Qualities Determine Your Success in Business.' Nice to have you on the program again.

Cloud: Pleasure.

Tavis: That's our show for tonight. You can catch me on the weekends on PRI, Public Radio International. Check your local listings. See you back here next time on PBS. Until then, good night from L.A. Thanks for watching, and as always, keep the faith.