When Moe Rock isn’t running the Los Angeles Tribune, he’s busy trying to help entrepreneurs build their community, elevate their leadership and improve their personal development. He believes that everything comes down to integrity and is releasing his debut book The Moral Compass: 28 Principles for Integrity-Driven Leadership next month. “I think we don’t have enough conversations on integrity,” he says. “Without integrity, we cannot have a functioning organization, we cannot have healthy relationships, we cannot have a flourishing world, it all starts with integrity, it’s the foundational component of all success and it’s the foundational component of all aspects of life.”
While companies are spending more on integrity training, maintaining a high level of integrity doesn’t come without challenges. According to the EY Global Integrity Report 2022, 97% of respondents said integrity is important. But more than half said that standards of integrity either stayed the same or worsened over the 18 months leading up to the report.
It’s statistics like this that inspired Rock to write his book in the first place. In order to give leaders more ways to think about the role integrity plays in their lives and in their companies, Rock shares 28 principles in his book for leaders to marinate. One of those 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 that will leave your organization. There’s a practical reason why you want to incorporate empathy in your business and in 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 rapidly changing environment and trying to keep up. While he acknowledges computers are going to replace a lot of the tasks that humans do, he highlights what connects us to one another is “our heart-centered decisions, our integrity, our empathy, our ability to love.”
Rock sat down with Jessica Abo to share more about his book, the role he sees AI playing in journalism, and what it’s been like taking over a legacy brand.
