Excerpt from Winners Never Cheat: Even in Difficult Times, New and Expanded Edition

As you read this book, I know you will feel as I did when I first read it. I hope you’ll also feel compelled to share it with as many people as you can. I have never in my life purchased any book by the case, except for this one. As I meet people who question if business can be done with honesty and integrity, I send them a copy of this book to remind them that the answer is “yes,” not only can it be done, it is being done.

This isn’t a book limited to doing business. This isn’t a book about a company that introduced the world to plastic egg cartons, plastic plates, or plastic knives and forks—this is a book about the man behind it. This is a book about life, about principles, and how success is a by-product of living those principles. This is a book about how success and blessings will rush to you by doing good first. Just ask Jon Huntsman if you’ll be able to give away the money and blessings of success quickly enough.

Read the rest of the Foreword from Glenn Beck.

Excerpt from Winners Never Cheat: Everyday Values We Learned as Children (But May Have Forgotten)
Nice guys really can and do finish first in life.

I worked as White House staff secretary and a special assistant to the president during the first term of the Nixon administration. I was the funnel through which passed documents going to and from the president’s desk. I also was part of H. R.Haldeman’s “super staff.” As a member of the team, Haldeman expected me to be unquestioning. It annoyed him that I was not. He proffered blind loyalty to Nixon and demanded the same from his staff. I saw how power was abused, and I didn’t buy in.  One never has to. 

I was asked by Haldeman on one occasion to do something “to help” the president. We were there to serve the president, after all. It seems a certain self-righteous congressman was questioning one of Nixon’s nominations for agency head. There was some evidence the nominee had employed undocumented workers in her California business. 

Haldeman asked me to check out a factory previously owned by this congresswoman to see whether that report were true. The facility happened to be located close to my own manufacturing plant in Fullerton, California. Haldeman wanted me to place some of our Latino employees on an undercover operation at the plant in question. The information would be used, of course, to embarrass the political adversary.  

An amoral atmosphere had penetrated the White House. Meetings with Haldeman were little more than desperate attempts by underlings to be noticed. We were all under the gun to produce solutions. Too many were willing to do just about anything for Haldeman’s nod of approval. That was the pressure that had me picking up the phone to call my plant manager. 

There are times when we react too quickly to catch the rightness and wrongness of something immediately. We don’t think it through. This was one of those times. It took about 15 minutes for my inner moral compass to make itself noticed, to bring me to the point that I recognized this wasn’t the right thing to do. Values that had accompanied me since childhood kicked in. 

Halfway through my conversation, I paused. “Wait a minute, Jim,” I said deliberately to the general manager of Huntsman Container, “let’s not do this. I don’t want to play this game. Forget I called.”

 I instinctively knew it was wrong, but it took a few minutes for the notion to percolate. I informed Haldeman that I would not have my employees spy or do anything like it. To the second most powerful man in America, I was saying no. He didn’t appreciate responses like that. He viewed them as signs of disloyalty. I might as well have been saying farewell.

So be it, and I did leave within six months of that incident. My streaks of independence, it turned out, were an exercise in good judgment. I was about the only West Wing staff member not eventually hauled before the congressional Watergate committee or a grand jury.

Chapter 1: Values from the Sandbox