Success Quote by Lee R. Raymond

Ethics, Lee R. Raymond implies, isn’t a policy you laminate and hang by the elevator. It’s muscle memory: the accumulated result of what an organization rewards, tolerates, and quietly teaches new hires to stop questioning. The line sounds reassuring on the surface - patient, pragmatic, almost comforting. The subtext is sharper: if ethical conduct takes a “long period of time” to become inherent, then the real work isn’t a quarterly compliance training but the slow engineering of incentives, leadership behavior, and consequences that outlast any one scandal cycle.

Raymond’s phrasing also does a kind of corporate jujitsu. By casting ethics as “inherent” and time-bound, responsibility shifts from immediate accountability to institutional evolution. That can be wise (culture does take time) and self-protective (culture takes time). The sentence leaves out the messy part: organizations don’t drift into ethics; they drift into whatever helps them win. “Over a long period” can describe principled stewardship, or it can describe how corner-cutting becomes tradition.

Context matters because Raymond isn’t a philosopher; he’s a career oil executive, most famously tied to Exxon’s era of disciplined operations and aggressive defense of corporate interests. Read in that light, the quote functions like a management creed: ethics as embedded system, not personal virtue. It’s a reminder that a company’s morality is less about what it claims and more about what it practices so consistently that it stops feeling like a choice.