“Great culture is an intangible created through a system of tangibles. These tangibles, ranging from the rhetoric of the upper management to the way entry-level employees are treated, separate good companies from great companies,” said Kellye Gordon, senior director of ethics and compliance at VF Corporation.

Gordon came to the School of Business for a talk focused on the importance of integrity in the business world. More than 75 students, faculty, and staff gathered in Broyhill Auditorium for the event, sponsored by the School’s BB&T Center for the Study of Capitalism.

Gordon faces the challenge of translating complex company policies into everyday action for over 60,000 employees at VF Corporation, a major apparel and footwear company headquartered in Greensboro, North Carolina, with an annual revenue of over $12 billion and more than 30 major brands including Jansport, North Face, and Vans.

Despite the company’s size and international purview, Gordon focuses on ensuring that each individual is aware of the company’s values and vision. Gordon refers to VF’s ethical approach as “a process that creates cultural integrity and inclusion,” and she shared that VF Corporation was recently named to the 2018 World’s Most Ethical Companies Honoree List by the Ethisphere Institute.

The talk was a discussion of ethics and compliance between Gordon and Bryan Starrett, adjunct professor of the practice at the School. Throughout the conversation, students participated in electronic polls and submitted questions for Gordon through a text message survey. These features created an interactive environment where students listened to a conversation between two ethics and compliance specialists while also asking questions of their own. “Company integrity is imperative to success, yet the definition of integrity can be ambiguous,” Gordon said.

Josh Nnaji, a Wake Forest sophomore, said he attended the event because he was curious about how business and ethics coexist. “I learned the importance of creating a culture that prioritizes ethics, and a dialogue that facilitates productive criticism,” he said.