Boeing Ouster Brings Ethics Into Question

Boeing's ousting of turnaround CEO Harry Stonecipher masked a much bigger headline for Corporate America -- how should an executive's personal affairs factor into his or her business life?

According to Boeing's board, Stonecipher's affair with an unnamed female executive "reflected poorly on Harry's judgment and would impair his ability to lead the company," despite each partner's reported consent.

Business reporters picked up on the implications that judgment has on the rest of the country's business leadership.

"Then the question is when can you have a consensual relationship, and when can you not," says Kimberly Blanton, workplace reporter for The Boston Globe.

In her story, she wrote that Boeing's decision "sent a warning to anyone involved in garden-variety office romance: Even consensual relationships can spell trouble if employees' desires conflict with management's goals."

It helps to zoom out from isolated business news stories and see how they touch the larger corporate domain. Blanton used this story to ask other area companies whether they've instituted policies for or against co-worker relationships. "Often, there are interesting questions at the bottom of these news stories," she says. Hunt for them.

For The Wall Street Journal Online, another underlying story was how unprotected office e-mails can be. The board discovered Stonecipher's secret through an e-mail he had sent to the female employee he was seeing.

Another dangerous offshoot, Blanton says, is when these relationships go sour, claims of sexual harassment could pop up, dunking the company in liability.

In this case, the question concerned a topic about which Boeing's board was unsurprisingly mum. "Murky" was used often to describe the initial details. The affair itself didn't violate Boeing's code of conduct, the board said, but it did appear to breach a line that prohibits employees from engaging in conduct or activity that may "cause embarrassment to the company." A married Stonecipher sullying the company's ethical ground after being brought in to sweep it up seemed to fit that category.

But that made business reporters dig harder for nuggets of information. Blanton says to go to public relations armed with as much background and as many questions as possible. "The more questions you ask, the more you will get to know."

However, in an era when presidents can get impeached for their office affairs and companies are publicly dissected for ethics abuses, Stonecipher is a bigger story today than he would have been in the past.

"Just as political figures' personal lives became fair game in the post-Watergate era, the post-Enron climate may bring the same scrutiny to corporate executives' personal conduct," wrote Shirleen Holt, a business reporter for The Seattle Times, pointing to former co-workers and now married couple Bill and Melinda Gates.

The initial lack of details will likely keep business reporters hooked on this story until they learn more. "These stories don't die until we figure out what's going on," Blanton says. "Is this the tip of the iceberg? We don't know."

Other stories about the implications of Boeing's decision:

• Associated Press
• The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
• The Boston Herald
• The Chicago Tribune
• Christian Science Monitor
• The Los Angeles Times
• Newsday
• Reuters
• The Seattle Post-Intelligencer
• The Seattle Times
• The Washington Post story and Q&A

Copyright © 2008 Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism