SMITH BRAIN TRUST — Call him old school, but BB&T Chairman and CEO Kelly S. King believes in absolutes. “You should be absolutely 100 percent honest,” he told faculty, staff and students on Sept. 26, 2017, at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business. “There are a lot of people in academia who will disagree with that, who will say there are no absolutes. They will tell you there is nothing that is really objective. It’s all relative.”
King said people who accept that way of thinking should try telling their significant others that they are committed to 99 percent honesty. “If you’re not honest with me 1 percent of the time, how can I completely trust you?” he said. “And If I can’t completely trust you, how can I depend on you? And if I can’t depend on you, how can we have a mutually supportive relationship?”
King said BB&T has 10 absolute values, starting with honesty. “We not only hang them on the wall,” he said. “We live by them.”
Once a person commits to a set of values, the next step is consistency. A person can’t be 100 percent honest Monday through Friday and take the weekend off. “That doesn’t work,” King said. “Integrity is about living all of your values consistently.”
King, the featured guest at the Smith School’s BB&T Colloquium on Capitalism, Ethics and Leadership, said his bank faced a test in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. “The world was collapsing around us,” he said. “When you’re going through a critical period of time, you will find that you are tested and you are challenged, and there will be temptations to take shortcuts.”
He said BB&T had to rethink its strategy and place more emphasis on day-to-day execution, but corporate values stayed the same. “It’s important to know what your priorities are, and live your priorities,” he said. “Because if you don’t, you end up losing your sense of direction and your sense of purpose.”
Smith School professor Rajshree Agarwal, director of the school’s Ed Snider Center for Enterprise and Markets, moderated the discussion. The annual colloquium is supported by a $1.5 million gift from BB&T in 2010.
Other topics covered by King:
- Why the CEO Can't Motivate You
- Delegate Like a Big Bank CEO
- Leadership Malpractice on Performance Reviews
- Reset Yourself Like a Big Bank CEO
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About the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business
The Robert H. Smith School of Business is an internationally recognized leader in business education and cutting-edge research. The school’s world-class faculty facilitate experiential learning opportunities rooted in the real world. Smith students learn to think like entrepreneurs, prepared to drive positive impact. The school offers undergraduate, online and on-campus business master's, full-time, part-time, online and executive MBA, plus PhD and DBA degree programs, and non-degree and executive education programs. Where Smith leads, the future follows.