Cross & Crescent

Core Values form the foundation of Lambda Chi Alpha’s approach to brotherhood. As a part of the True Brother Initiative, our Seven Core Values — Loyalty, Duty, Respect, Service & Stewardship, Honor, Integrity, and Personal Courage — once learned and internalized equip each undergraduate brother with a clear moral compass always orienting him, no matter the environment or consequences, toward making ethical decisions.

For Lambda Chi Alpha, it is not enough simply to know how to do things the right way; more important is to do right things, for brotherhood and leadership are ultimately about action, about doing.

Jack Bovender, a True Brother

Hospital Corporation of America Chairman and CEO Jack Bovender, Jr. (Duke 1967) truly exemplifies our Seven Core Values — both personally and professionally. He joined the HCA family more than 20 years ago, and became chairman and CEO in January 2002. Based in Nashville, Tennessee, HCA is the leading provider of health care services in the United States, composed of locally managed facilities that include 168 hospitals and 113 outpatient centers in 20 states and England.

An Educational Foundation board member, Bovender was a 2002 Order of Achievement recipient. We recently spent a few minutes asking him to comment about what each of our Seven Core Values means to him.

Loyalty

“In anyone’s life and career, loyalty I think is a hallmark of a person’s character…..Through your lifetime — school, the Fraternity, fate or mutual goals and ambitions put you together with people and help form who you are. I think it is incredibly important that loyalty exists between those people. That you are able to find people in your life that you can trust when the chips may be down to help you because of their personal commitment to you, which is loyalty, their personal friendship to you — that they trust you and they believe that you will return that trust to them.”

Duty

“I think what duty means and why it’s important for all of us is that we either very directly, or maybe sometimes in an indirect way, say that we are going to do certain things and we’re going to act in certain ways — and people by every right depend on that to be the case. So when someone fails at his or her duty they are in a sense letting others who are depending upon them down. In fact, it may affect the outcome of some business transaction or some professional responsibility that they may have as a doctor or lawyer, as example.”

Respect

“I think all of us owe every other person that we meet in our life — whether they’re close or just causal acquaintances — respect, regardless of what that person does and regardless of how that person relates to you…..I have seen in my life and in my career people who showed me tremendous respect and acted in a specific way toward me….This is a small world in a lot of respects and we depend on a lot of people to do things for us and to help us in certain ways…and I think it is incredibly important that we show everyone respect whether they are washing dishes in the back or serving us at a restaurant, or whether they’re the CEO of the firm we work for.

Service & Stewardship

“I think about Service & Stewardship outside of the context of what you do to make your living. And that is in any community that we live in we’ve got a responsibility to use our time, talent, and money to make that community better. And many times that may mean that if you’ve got an expertise or ability, that you contribute to a non-for-profit board, human services organization, or an arts organization. It’s all based on the premise that at this point in time we are at a certain place and time in a certain community and there were people who came before us who made incredible contributions…and we have a responsibility not just to turn it over to the next generation as good as we have, but in fact make it better.”

Honor

“But I really think that at the core of it, honor means that you carry certain moral values that even in the most difficult circumstances — when it would be easy to not do the right thing — that you always in fact do the right thing….In the military these things are sometimes more apparent because as people live, particularly in small units, each man’s honor is what makes other people trust him and make people loyal to him.”

Integrity

“In terms of integrity, it means that you will in fact live according to a code of ethics that is generally accepted in the walking around civil society that we live in. That you won’t take advantage of other people for your own gain; that, obviously, you won’t steal ; that you will — even if it causes you personal harm or loss — tell the truth even in those situations where you might rather disappear.”

Personal Courage

“I think personal courage ties in with the other things…sometimes it does take significant personal courage to own up to mistakes, to accept the blame for things that did not go right instead of trying to place the blame on others. That takes a lot of courage. A lot of people will try to weasel their way out, or blame stuff on other people. To me, personal courage is being willing to accept personal responsibility for your own acts and willing to do what it takes to make it right…instead of blaming it on others or trying to hide.”

Summary

“I think the Core Values are very important…the undergraduate years are very formative years. And if you are given an opportunity in a fraternity like Lambda Chi to associate with people, some of whom can be too ambitious or too greedy, more likely than that you will have a lot more people who share those same values with you and may be very diverse in terms of color, or race, or creed, or country of origin. But they share some of the same values about what’s important….I think it’s a wonderful time and place for the leadership of the Fraternity to help young men solidify those values and not get lost in the melee that sometimes happens in college.”