You’ve go to hand it to Lars Andersen. The vice president in charge of the Boeing Co.’s longer-range 777 programs had just watched his pride and joy, the 777-200LR Worldliner, take its first flight into a warm, springlike sky Tuesday morning, and then with the cameras rolling a reporter tried to bring him back to earth.
How does this success feel, the reporter asked, in comparison to Monday’s news that Boeing CEO Harry Stonecipher had been forced out in a sex scandal?
Andersen smiled – or maybe he was gritting his teeth – and carefully recited the company line.
“We’re focused on our customers, their passengers and our products,” he said. “We’re in this industry to build airplanes and delight our customers.”
Meanwhile, a few feet away, everyone else was gossiping.
“What I wanna know is whether we’ll ever find out who the woman is,” one of Andersen’s Boeing colleagues quietly told me.
The news that the 68-year-old Stonecipher had been forced to resign after a fling with a co-worker has set tongues wagging from Mukilteo to Munich.
In Europe, a friend e-mailed me to say that a man with grandchildren who is still chasing skirts is someone who should be admired, not fired.
In Britain, the cheeky tabloid press sunk its teeth deep into the story – then sent out for Benny Hill’s dentures to take a second bite.
“Boeing sends flirtatious CEO packing,” chortled The Register. “Gone are the good old days when it took vodka-(spouting) ice sculptures, fake subsidiaries and government payoffs to get canned as a CEO,” Ashlee Vance reported from Chicago. “Now, all a top executive has to do is play a bit of tonsil hockey with an underling.”
On the Continent, they sniffed. Things are different in Europe, an analyst told Bloomberg News. “If things worked like that in France, there wouldn’t be a CEO left standing.”
And even on this side of the Atlantic, there was some incredulity that in this age, when captains of industry cook books and loot company treasuries, a CEO would get canned over a personal indiscretion that – by all accounts – hasn’t hurt business.
“The Puritans Have Landed,” Forbes reported.
Here in Everett, there’s been some head-scratching. Stonecipher is not the first top Boeing executive to be accused of parking his jet in someone else’s hangar. After Phil Condit resigned 15 months ago, BusinessWeek reported that the former Boeing boss “had a reputation as a womanizer.”
But Condit’s downfall was the result of a Pentagon procurement scandal, not sex shenanigans. So why, some people are asking, did Boeing get moral with Stonecipher? There must be more to the story, some suspect.
“The excuse for firing Harry Stonecipher sounds bogus,” wrote Tim Ratzeloff, a Snohomish County stock watcher.
On the other hand, Seth Jayson at Motley Fool wrote that Stonecipher did himself in.
“The problem for Stonecipher, and Boeing, is that he was the much-touted return to righteousness,” he wrote. “Ethics, Boeing said, matter.”
And if that’s truly the case, “just how much money does it take to get a CEO to lead by example?” Jayson wrote. “Is it too much to ask that someone earning $1.5 million plus options, retirement and $600,000 worth of relocation fees not cheat on his wife by conducting affairs with his subordinates?
“If you can’t trust managers to live according to their own ethics rules in the personal conduct, can you trust them to give investors straight talk when it’s time to report the numbers?” Jayson asked.
Let’s give a Canadian the last word. Margaret Wente in The Globe and Mail of Toronto wrote that “the only person who deserves to be upset with Mr. Stonecipher – a weather-beaten 68-year-old with the apparent sex appeal of a rutabaga – is Mrs. Stonecipher.”
“At Airbus,” she concluded, “I can guarantee that the men who run the company are laughing their heads off. Over there, they have a different view of ethics. They also have mistresses.”
Given that, the Boeing board’s new moral stand is “not just silly,” Wente wrote. “It is a ruinous competitive disadvantage.”
Reporter Bryan Corliss: 425-339-3454 or corliss@heraldnet.com.
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