What do Olympus, Nortel and Ornge have in common?
Olympus is a Japanese camera maker that is accused of falsifying its books, hiding losses, and covering it up with complex unrelated transactions.
Nortel is the now-defunct Canadian telecommunications manufacturer whose top executives are on trial, accused of rigging the books to trigger executive and management bonuses.
Ornge is the Ontario Air Ambulance Service in which paramedics transport urgently ill or injured patients to their destination, often from remote locations. It is embroiled in a scandal, written about elsewhere here, where public funds was allegedly used to create private for profit entities benefitting a few senior executives. The Ontario Provincial Police have been asked by the government to investigate.
In each case, different though they are, a common thread arises about the quality of oversight. These are cases where in the executive ranks something got in the way of good judgement, and no one else seems to have been looking in the right place to see it.
The oversight question is complex, touching on having the right incentives to do the right thing, protecting whistleblowers (a former CEO in the case of Olympus), and the Board having enough distance from the CEO and executive team to ensure that the management team understands and appreciates intuitively that not only is the oversight real and present, it will have teeth. These are (or were) top-notch name brand organizations – at one level it is terrible shame that their former leaders are embroiled in criminal proceedings, and at another level.
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