Make It, Don't Fake It

CHAPTER ONE

SOME REALLY BAD ADVICE

As this is a book about achieving business success with integrity, it is important to understand something about why people lie. It is obvious that lying should not be our modus operandi, yet it happens all the time, in various forms and for different reasons. Understanding what compels people to fabricate the truth, to fake it, and to just plain lie is useful in coming up with the strategies and tools to avoid or prevent it.

There is a broad spectrum of fakery, from the perfectly innocent—Adler’s “acting as if”—to the perfectly criminal. In what follows, I explain that continuum with examples. To help you visualize it, I offer my Fake-O-Meter (figure 1). Note that the phrase “FAKING IT” marks the point at ...