Is Being Loyal Still Valued in Our Society?

The other day one of the PBS network stations aired Donald Trump interview. He is well known as a real estate tycoon and a major figure in the casino/hotel industry. His flamboyant life style and Trump skyscrapers in Manhattan certainly represent his fame and success in his field. His current celebrity role on television reality show ‘The Apprentice’ is growing popularity. There is no doubt that many ambitious young people admire his success.

However, neither his success nor his fame caught my attention. I was more interested in his downtime experience. Like many successful business people who went through their trying times, he also had to pay his due. Interestingly, his experience in failure was more dramatic than others and seemed that taught him a great deal.

The late 1990s his financial problems made his name well known when his unstoppable ambition to expand business came to halt and led to 900 million dollars in debt. At that time, his financial problem was so big his creditors could not offered let him go down. However, some of his friends in the business, he thought they were his friends, had turned on him and had nothing to do with him when he needed them the most.

He realized then who really his friends were. "People kiss your ass when you are successful. But people turn on you when you fail even colleagues who used to work with you. They don’t want you to call them anymore. You can make an interesting movie about it." He continues, "For example, I hired a woman. She was very unattractive physically and I found out later mentally as well. I took her out of her government job and made her successful."

His point was that he asked her to make a phone call to her friend as a favor when his company was in trouble. Her friend was a banker and a very close friend of her, who would do anything if she asked. But she told Donald, "I couldn’t do that. And, I am leaving the company to do my own business." He made her very successful otherwise she couldn’t be as successful in the business. Because of her success, she bought a beautiful house and met her handsome husband who married her for her money. However, right after she left his company, she lost everything; house, business, and her husband divorced her.

Over the years, she has called his company many times and left many messages with his secretary to return her calls, but he didn’t cared much about her anymore and never called her back. In fact, he gave the worst reference about her.

The moral of his story was that he thinks loyalty in business is important. It tells something about the person. People can count on him or her when they need the most. In recent years, I haven’t heard anyone who even speaks about loyalty. I don’t believe that it’s even existed in the corporate world or in our society. Mergers and acquisitions are common in the business now days and employees are not considered their assets and no one cares them anymore and vice versa.

Another example, Arnold Schwartzenegger was on one of the late night shows recently. When the host asked him about his support for the president, his answer was very staggering. He sees the president’s popularity is slipping, he turned his back on him completely. They both once supported each other for their political campaigns as Republican Party. That tells us a lot about him as a human being. Now, he is running again for the second term as a governor in California.

It is a rare character to find from a person. I didn’t think of Donald Trump much as a person but admired his business acumen, ambition, and thrive. Now, I can see why Donald Trump is very successful because he values something more from his employees and friends which others don’t. In return, he keeps them as his friends forever.