I recently finished Warren Buffett's biography Snowball, and this is a recurring theme in his life. His integrity is one of the most important factors in his success; he got a great deal or gotten out of a sticky situation with regulators simply because people trusted him to do the right thing.

This took decades though, he'd been operating in this manner since he was a child, but it wasn't until he was in his 50s that all that goodwill began to work for him on an unimaginable scale.