Chicago Tribune features Bonnie Soodik, Boeing's top ethics officer
By Steve | May 20, 2006
The Chicago Tribune is on a roll. Two days ago they had an insightful editorial on corporate corruption. And today they had a lengthy profile of Bonnie Soodik, SVP in their Office of Internal Governance.
I usually find that the more I know about the actual facts of a story, the more disappointed I am about inaccuracies in news coverage. In this case, however, the Tribune seemed to get the story mostly right. In his article titled "Making Boeing Fly Right," Trib reporter Ameet Sachdev included balanced analysis like:
"Keeping a company with more than 150,000 employees worldwide out of trouble is a seemingly impossible job, but it appears Soodik has made a difference since she was appointed head of the office of internal governance three years ago. Calls to the ethics hotline have nearly doubled since 2003, and formal ethics cases are resolved in less than a month, down from an average of 120 days."
This emphasis is especially gratifying to us at ELG, because we highlighted these as challenges for Boeing in an assessment we did for them in 2003. (Which I can only mention here because Boeing took the unprecedented step of posting it on their website.) Boeing has worked extraordinarily hard to move these metrics, and the hard work has obviously paid off.
This leads me to the one major omission in the article. Because Bonnie has many roles, including oversight of Internal Audit and Import/Export Compliance, she relies heavily on Martha Ries, VP of Ethics and Business Conduct, to drive the day to day operations of their ethics program. She and Bonnie both are, in the words of CEO Jim McNerny, among "Boeing's greatest assets."