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Boeing to plead guilty to criminal fraud charge stemming from 737 MAX crashes

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Re: Boeing to plead guilty to criminal fraud charge stemming from 737 MAX crashes

#91
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem is that finding the people responsible can be extremely hard > What Boeing really needs is a complete change in management culture Who is ultimately responsible for management at a company though? The CEO and the other C-level people. This isn't really the daunting difficult problem you make it out to be: the buck stops at the C-suite. Who else could possibly be ultimately responsible??

You can not punish someone for a crime they didn't commit and had no knowledge of. That is ridiculous and a perversion of justice.

There were two crashes. After the first crash Boeing were quite happy to pin the blame on the Lion Air pilots. At that point the C suite were definitely involved in every decision.

Re: Boeing to plead guilty to criminal fraud charge stemming from 737 MAX crashes

#92
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Make the CEO responsible, want those big rewards (high ceo pay) get ready to deal with big responsibility. I’m sure if CEOs were criminally liable things would change very quickly.

The criminal precedent of punishing a person for a crime they didn't commit and had no knowledge of is so bad that I honestly didn't think any reasonable person could come up with this.

There were two crashes. The CEO most certainly should have known about the problems after the first one.

It’s the CEO’s job to ensure that sufficient measures are in place to prevent failure. They should not be punished for accidents; they should be punished if the accidents were reasonably predictable.

Which was most certainly the case when they decided to the redundant AoA sensor an optional extra.

Re: Boeing to plead guilty to criminal fraud charge stemming from 737 MAX crashes

#93
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proving something like criminal negligence is extremely hard. The supply chain of software in aerospace is extremely long and finding out who exactly was acting negligent is near impossible.

> When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it’s run like a business rather than a great engineering firm. Yeah, hard to prove.

Stonecipher was CEO nearly 20 years ago. Are you proposing to put someone in jail for crimes which happened over a decade after he left the company. Someone which has certainly ZERO knowledge of anything related to the MAX?

It is not illegal to be a bad CEO.

Re: Boeing to plead guilty to criminal fraud charge stemming from 737 MAX crashes

#94
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If they know they face prison if the company plays foul in a major way, they will put pressure on their deputies to change culture. It is completely ridiculous to criminally prosecute leadership for crimes which happened without their knowing/consent/acknowledgment. It would be a perversion of justice to jail someone because many levels down someone else committed a crime. The best corporate culture does not prevent…

They should be liable by default. But of course people at a lower position can be liable for their own crimes. That is for a court to decide.

That is a perversion of justice and sets unimaginably bad precedent.

Re: Boeing to plead guilty to criminal fraud charge stemming from 737 MAX crashes

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that finding the people responsible can be extremely hard, so you have to go against the corporation itself. Punishing a corporation is easy, but the government hates doing it for obvious reasons. It means ruining something which is useful to you and punishing tens of thousands of completely innocent people, with inevitable layoffs. What Boeing really needs is a complete change in management culture, a…

Why can't the government mandate a board replacement? The board can figure out for themselves who is responsible, I would guess the finger would typically point at the CEO.

You would keep the status quo. The problem with Boeing is the replacement of a strong engineering-first culture with a profit-first culture over decades. It's a classic playbook: acquire company, erode product quality and culture for profit, pay out shareholders, discard hollowed-out husk.

Re: Boeing to plead guilty to criminal fraud charge stemming from 737 MAX crashes

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well what are the ridiculously high salaries for if they don't even take responsibility. I mean parents are liable for their children, so why should a CEO not be made responsible for the culture of the corporation underneath them?

Because that would be a perversion of justice. You can not pay someone to take on criminal liability for crimes they didn't commit and could not have any knowledge of. Just imagine what precedent this would set if it was allowed. If courts would accept that criminal liability can be transferred in exchange of cash, how would the justice system look like? "Culture" is completely ephemeral and having a court of law det…

The responsibility doesn't come from the money, it comes from being the Chief Executive, with nearly unlimited operational authority. The money would be compensation for liability that would be inherent to their position.

Re: Boeing to plead guilty to criminal fraud charge stemming from 737 MAX crashes

#97
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can not punish someone for a crime they didn't commit and had no knowledge of. That is ridiculous and a perversion of justice.

It seems to me the real perversion of justice is executives constantly avoiding consequences for their actions

It is not illegal to be a bad CEO.

CEOs, surprisingly are protected by the law as well.

Re: Boeing to plead guilty to criminal fraud charge stemming from 737 MAX crashes

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The criminal precedent of punishing a person for a crime they didn't commit and had no knowledge of is so bad that I honestly didn't think any reasonable person could come up with this.

There is immense precedent to punish a person for a crime they were responsible for and that they should have known was happening.

The software issues definitely were not something the CEO should have known about.

Re: Boeing to plead guilty to criminal fraud charge stemming from 737 MAX crashes

#99
The people saying “send the CEO to jail” or “make the board liable” are vastly oversimplifying the complexity of the issue here, which is about how to enforce regulations and standards without torpedoing your economy. One of the single most important reasons why the US has such a successful business culture is because of its approach to liability - virtually all business debt can be erased in a bankruptcy, and the entrepreneur is not personally responsible. This is not the case in many other developed countries, with one consequence being that the entrepreneurial culture there is nowhere near as developed as in the US.

https://swz.it/europes-failure-to-deal-with-failure/

And so you really don’t want to set up a situation where the operators of a company are by-default responsible for anything that their company does. Of course, that has limits and people can still be individually charged for crimes, but the point here is that this is not a by-default thing. This problem is magnified by a thousand with a company like Boeing that is so intertwined with the government and not easily replaceable.

It seems to me that the solution to this kind of issue might come from studying successful occupations done by the US - post-WW2 Japan is the one that comes to mind. The Allies (mainly the Americans) managed to defeat an enemy state, punish some (but not all) of the people it deemed to have done wrong, and then set up systems which turned out to be largely effective at putting the country on a good path. Fixing an entity like Boeing seems similar in nature, if much smaller than an actual country.

Re: Boeing to plead guilty to criminal fraud charge stemming from 737 MAX crashes

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The criminal precedent of punishing a person for a crime they didn't commit and had no knowledge of is so bad that I honestly didn't think any reasonable person could come up with this.

There were two crashes. The CEO most certainly should have known about the problems after the first one. It’s the CEO’s job to ensure that sufficient measures are in place to prevent failure. They should not be punished for accidents; they should be punished if the accidents were reasonably predictable. Which was most certainly the case when they decided to the redundant AoA sensor an optional extra.

>There were two crashes. The CEO most certainly should have known about the problems after the first one.

Then drag him to court for that. But this is totally different to charging him with the crimes of other people he couldn't have known about.

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