The violent anti-globalization protests in Seattle in 1998 led Theresa Szeliga, Director of Ethics and Business Conduct at Boeing’s commercial aircraft division in Seattle, on a search that brought her to the Caux business conferences.

The violent anti-globalization protests in Seattle in 1998 led Theresa Szeliga, Director of Ethics and Business Conduct at Boeing’s commercial aircraft division in Seattle, on a search that brought her to the Caux business conferences. She was aware of the Caux Round Table’s Principles for Business and had checked into last year’s Caux business conference after finding it announced on the web.

‘Peace had been the Boeing experience for the 90 years of its globalizing,’ she told this year’s conference. ‘Boeing now has facilities in Russia, China, Australia, Canada and elsewhere. The protests caused me to realise that perhaps Boeing had been very fortunate. This led me to inquire about the experiences outside the aerospace industry.’

‘Organisations are well served—and profit—when they understand and promote ethical values and aspirations, inspire those in the organisation to live the values, and have an accountability system to address conduct that does not meet the minimum acceptable standards set by the organization,’ she said.

Boeing had a core value of ‘working together’, she continued. It meant putting people first, finding ways of solving problems together, enjoying and respecting each other and sharing. ‘We call this “talk the talk and walk the walk”. This was similar to the core values of Caux Initiatives for Business, of honesty, purity, unselfishness and love, which ‘we are encouraged to live by as demonstrated by the CIB leadership’. The company was now expanding its annual ethics training programme for its managers and employees from once a year to three times a year.

Szeliga described how the fall-out from the Enron and WorldCom corporate accounting scandals had affected business operations across America, including Boeing. US companies had had varied experiences in complying with last year’s Sarbanes-Oxley Act, outlining requirements for corporate responsibility, following the scandals. ‘Companies that did not have robust [ethics] programmes in place are highly distracted by complying with the new laws’, Szeliga said, and were having to spend lots of money. ‘Other companies with robust ethics programmes have also had to make changes to comply, but these changes are relatively modest.’

‘Boeing,’ she said, ‘strengthened processes for certifying financial statements and internal controls.’ The company had also decided to ‘leap frog’ the regulations by moving its ethics programme to a higher level. The company had decided this year to introduce an emphasis on ‘creating a more open culture under the core value of integrity’. ‘In sum, people do matter. Ethics does matter. Moreover good ethics is good business,’ she concluded.

Conference Report

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© Caux Initiatives for Business, 2003