Logica North America CEO Amanda Mesler discovered that her best performing salesperson was forging expense reports. A mild punishment would have been insufficient.

Question: Moral and ethical dilemmas in business.

Amanda Mesler: We had a sales executive, just a phenomenal individual, and top sales person in our entire company, and we just found out that he was a turning in expense reports that were a bit false. That had some made up names, made up individuals on them. Wasn’t trying to get a lot of money out of Logica, just went to lunch with you know, his friends, and put down a client and again a hundred dollars, a couple of a hundred dollar type of thing.

It was very difficult, I do not believe at all in lying. I don’t believe in stealing in anyway.

And yet, here’s this high top performer, the biggest performer that we have in the company, when you’re trying to grow a company as well. Very, very difficult situation. My head went out, the way I run my business went out, and we ended up letting the individual go, but it was a very difficult thing because you could have done a slap on the wrist, you could have done some other punishment, if you will, to fit the crime, a couple of hundred dollars, but we were really are trying to build a very professional high integrity company, and just one thing like that could sow many bad seeds in the company.

Recorded on: June 07, 2009