Boeing, Part II: The New Spending

compensation

Boeing reported second-quarter earnings today, which were predictably awful given the company’s safety and compliance lapses. So now seems like a good time to ponder the company’s recent promise to the Justice Department to increase spending on compliance efforts by $455 million over the next three years. What’s that all about?  As you may recall,…

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A Look at Boeing’s Plea Agreement

boeing

Pull up a chair, compliance officers! We finally have a text of the Justice Department’s plea agreement with Boeing for the company’s violation of its 2021 deferred-prosecution agreement. Let’s see what the compliance team and senior management have promised to do to improve the company’s misbegotten corporate culture. The basic terms of the plea agreement,…

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Big Compliance Reorg at Boeing

boeing

Boeing has announced a sweeping reorganization of its risk assurance functions, where compliance will report into legal and internal audit will report into a new operations, finance, and strategy division. Diana Sands, Boeing’s head of internal governance and the de facto chief of both functions until now, is retiring. Boeing announced the news via press…

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How Pressure Invades Corporate Culture

boeing

Boeing was perhaps the biggest corporate compliance story of 2019, and we see no signs of that changing so far in 2020. This weekend we had another glimpse into the flawed corporate culture there that ultimately caused Boeing’s disaster with the 737 MAX jets. So let’s take another look at the lessons others can learn…

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On the Importance of Ethics and Leadership

ethical dilemmas

Several weeks ago we had a post about the ethical missteps at Boeing, where I heaped lots of blame on now-fired CEO Dennis Muilenberg. That post generated many comments on LinkedIn, including a few that speculated: were these problems really due to Muilenberg, or was he undermined by subordinates who didn’t want him at Boeing?…

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More Misadventures in Ethics From Boeing

boeing

Boeing’s risk management failures with its 737 MAX jet turned out to be the biggest cautionary tale of corporate governance in 2019. Now we have one more glimpse into those executive misjudgments courtesy of the New York Times. The Times published yet another in-depth article about Boeing’s troubles on Sunday, this time starting with a…

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Another Lesson From Boeing: Silos

boeing

Boeing’s missteps with the 737 Max jet offer many powerful lessons for corporate compliance, audit, and risk executives. Our latest lesson comes from an in-depth article in the New York Times, examining the decisions Boeing made about the jet’s design and subsequent pilot training, and the terrible consequences that followed. Every compliance and audit professional…

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More on Boeing and Business Ethics

boeing

The more you consider Boeing’s mishandling of its trouble with the 737 MAX jet, the more lessons ethics and compliance professionals can tease out. This weekend I spent time pondering what Boeing’s decisions about safety software for the MAX say about the company’s supposed commitment to an ethical corporate culture. That led to this small…

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