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hanging around the office twelve and fourteen hours a day. It was a habit I developed after joining GE’s Corporate Audit staff. I routinely found myself getting home well after the kids had fallen asleep. Then I took a job working for a GE vice-chairman named Larry Bossidy. I quickly noticed a few things about Larry, who retired as the CEO of Honeywell. Larry came to work at a reasonable time and left in time for dinner, even if there was the ever-present possibility that Jack Welch might try to track him down in the evening. By the time I started working for him, he had nine children. He actually knew their names, and he went to a fair number of their games and school functions. Yet, if you surveyed the GE leadership team at any time during Larry’s tenure, they would tell you that Larry got more done than anyone they had ever known.
    Larry has, and I hope I now have, the self-confidence to let achievements rather than time spent in the office define our value. Nothing on earth can replace my oldest daughter’s volleyball games, my other daughter’s concerts, my son’s hockey games, or coaching my youngest daughter’s basketball team … nothing on earth!
    There is one final attribute of self-confidence: knowing that you possess absolute, unbending, unimpeachable integrity. Everyone must know that—above all else—it is integrity that defines character. There may come a day in your career when you are asked to approve, or wink at, or ignore something that, if you go along with it, will have a positive impact on some measure or metric for which you, your institution, or your friends will be judged favorably. You may know, that day, that you and your colleagues are near the edge. The lawyers or compliance people may say it’s “Okay” or “it shouldn’t be a problem,” or “that’s the way they do business in China” or “Hungary” or “in the insurance industry,” or wherever. But maybe it just doesn’t sit quite right in your gut. It is not the way of global business. You must understand that when you are near the edge, that line in the sand—or that line in your soul—is moving closer to you, not farther away; that you must have the confidence and the courage to say, “No, we are not doing this.”
    Then you can go home, look your family in the eye, and sleep like a baby. And there is nothing more important in any career than the ability to do that.

George Lopez
    Comedian and Host of Lopez Tonight

    Fortune Favors the Bold
    Anyone familiar with my stand-up routine or the show I had on ABC for four years probably knows that I had a miserable childhood. My migrant-worker father took off when I was two months old, and my mixed-up mother abandoned me when I was ten. I was raised by my biological grandmother and her second husband in a poor section of Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley.
    Going to college never crossed my mind. Instead, I have a Ph.D. from the school of hard knocks. To the parents of the kids I grew up around, I was an example: “You wanna end up like George Lopez?”
    My friends ran faster and were better athletes. And they had parents.
    Everything frightened me—the dark, other people, anything new.
    But I had two things nobody realized. One was determination. The other was a wicked sense of humor. From as far back as I can remember, something funny would always pop into my head. It was how I dealt with not having as much as everyone else. It has been the one constant companion on my journey.
    My grandmother Benita Gutierrez was the inspiration for my ABC show, which featured a dysfunctional family. I can still hear her scolding me: “Come over here. Why you crying?” With my grandmother, it wasn’t tough love. She was just tough.
    My grandmother and the man I called my grandfather, Refugio Gutierrez, were never diligent about my whereabouts or concerned with what I was learning or how I was learning. They never mentioned anything about me going to college or pursuing my