Monday morning brought news of Boeing Co.’s hasty decision to boot Chief Executive Officer Harry Stonecipher for a breach of its code of conduct — namely, conducting a romantic relationship with a junior executive. Boeing Chairman Lew Platt confronted Stonecipher, 68, after another female employee intercepted graphic emails and forwarded them to Platt. Stonecipher immediately admitted to the affair to Platt.
Compared to sex scandals of the recent past — think Bill Clinton; heck, think Bill O’Reilly — this one is relatively tame. Although initial reports described Stonecipher as “married,” later accounts contain unsourced supposition that he and his wife separated months before the relationship with the employee began. And, according to a Boeing internal investigation, there was no quid pro quo here of preferential treatment in return for sexual favors. Furthermore, the mystery woman has not charged that she was the victim of any sort of sexual harassment.
So what’s going on here? For his part, Platt is being masterfully Delphic about it all. In a conference call yesterday, he told reporters that while Boeing has no explicit code prohibiting affairs between employees, “when we looked into it, if certain details [of this one] were disclosed, it would cause embarrassment” to a company already under an ethical cloud. Stonecipher’s undisclosed actions, the cryptic Platt said, “reflected poorly on [his] judgment and would impair his ability to lead the company.”
Given the dearth of detail, the press did what it always does when it doesn’t know what the hell is going on — speculate. In this case, the speculation has focused on whether Stonecipher’s dismissal signals the start of a new era of corporate Puritanism.
In today’s Wall Street Journal, the paper’s editorial board shared that its “first reaction to the weekend dismissal of Boeing CEO Harry Stonecipher is that the 1990s are finally over. Whether in business or politics, chief executives were often given the benefit of the doubt in that decade, but no more.” (An aside: Is the Journal trying to compare Stonecipher’s fate to those of Eason Jordan or the embattled Larry Summers? Or was that reference to the 1990s just one more shot at the editorial board’s all-time favorite pincushion, Bill Clinton?)
Similarly, a Christian Science Monitor news article reported, “Corporate observers believe Boeing’s move may foretell a higher standard for personal behavior in the post-Enron world. In effect, the Boeing decision says that the chief executive, while no longer the meanest businessperson on the planet, has a responsibility to set the highest ethical standards in the company.”
But, as even the Journal and the Monitor acknowledge, Stonecipher’s actions cannot be viewed independently from the ghosts in Boeing’s closet. A little over a year ago, the company fired then-CEO Phil Condit in the wake of a scandal over defense contracts that resulted in prison sentences for two of its executives, Darleen A. Druyun and Michael M. Sears. Stonecipher was pulled out of retirement to get the company on track both financially and ethically. Relaying a conversation with Freada Klein, a consultant to companies on dealing with sexual harassment and other issues of workplace bias, the Associated Press’ Adam Geller wrote, “The biggest question provoked by Boeing’s ouster of CEO Harry Stonecipher on Monday is not what it says about how companies are changing, but whether this particular company would have acted at all if it hadn’t already been shadowed by a series of ethical lapses.”
Perhaps the Stonecipher saga will indeed usher in a new era of conduct, at least for CEO’s of tarnished companies that have promised to stiffen up their ethics codes. Or perhaps — just perhaps — that’s the angle that the Boeing crisis management team hoped the press would grab onto, instead of rolling up its sleeves and looking into the still-unanswered question of the day:
Is there maybe more to this story than a consensual sexual relationship that is no one’s business in the first place?
–Thomas Lang
Thomas Lang was a writer at CJR Daily.