Honesty and Integrity in Business
Rajeev is the founder of PR3 Systems, a Naperville-based IT services and consulting firm specializing in IBM's InfoSphere data platform. Before starting the company, he consulted for Fortune 500 firms in insurance and financial services, beginning his career in the MCS division of Price Waterhouse Coopers. He is an active member of Toastmasters International.
Every day, we find someone falling from grace. Sometimes it is a big debacle like Enron, which shakes us up and begs the question of whether we are on the right track with our strategies and techniques for getting ahead at the workplace. I always hear that in this cut-throat competitive workplace, we cannot succeed or get ahead without playing the game — bending the rules, cutting corners, saying what people want to hear.
Rajeev's career is an argument against that cynicism. He built PR3 Systems, founded in 2003, in one of the most competitive corners of enterprise consulting — IBM data-platform services, where every contract is fought over and margins are thin. The company grew by doing the opposite of what the cynics advise: specializing deeply, keeping consultants IBM-certified, and selling measurable results instead of buzzwords.
The counter-argument to that cynicism is simple, and it is structural rather than moral. A client who has been told the truth about what a project will cost and how long it will take becomes a client who comes back — and brings other clients. Integrity is not just a moral stance; it is a business model. Enron had the cleverest people in the room. Firms like PR3 Systems bet on being the most trustworthy.
That bet does not make headlines. Nobody writes a scandal story about a consulting firm that delivered what it promised. But the quiet record — founded in 2003, still operating, still certified, still in Naperville — is the rebuttal to the idea that honesty and integrity are luxuries the marketplace punishes.
In a year when headlines were full of falling giants, that was the point worth sitting down over coffee for.
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