When Moe Rock isn’t running the Los Angeles Tribune, he tries to help entrepreneurs build their community, elevate their leadership, and enhance their personal development. Believes it all comes down to integrity and releases his first book The Moral Compass: 28 Principles for Integrity-Based Leadership next month. “I think we don’t have enough conversations about integrity,” he says. “Without integrity we can’t have a functioning organization, we can’t have healthy relationships, we can’t have a thriving world, it all starts with integrity, it’s the fundamental component of all success and it’s is the fundamental component of all aspects of life.”
While companies are spending more on integrity training, maintaining a high level of integrity is not without its challenges. According to the EY Global Integrity Report 2022, 97% of respondents said integrity is important. But more than half said integrity standards have stayed the same or deteriorated in the 18 months leading up to the report.
It was statistics like this that inspired Rock to write his book in the first place. To empower leaders to think about the role integrity plays in their lives and in their business, Rock shares 28 principles in his book for Leaders to Pickle. One of them is empathy. “When you practice empathy, and when you create a culture of empathy, and when you have that as a value in the workplace, it actually increases productivity, it actually decreases the number of individuals who leave your organization. There’s a practical reason why you want to embed empathy into your business and into your culture. Let’s not forget what it’s like to be human, right?
Rock says it can be easy to forget we’re human beings when working in a fast-paced environment and trying to keep up. While he acknowledges that computers will replace many tasks done by humans, he points out that what connects us to each other is “our heart-centered decisions, our integrity, our empathy, our ability to love.”
Rock sat down with Jessica Abo to learn more about her book, the role he sees AI playing in journalism, and what it’s been like taking over a legacy brand.
