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Comment by claudius | Hacker News Reader

> but the leadership responsible still needs to face a judge

There’s your problem, assuming that there is a way for leadership in a company not be responsible. Managers being ‘responsible’ is the only argument for them being paid disproportionally more than the average worker. In turn, a manager should always be responsible for the actions of their underlings all the way to the top, regardless of personal involvement in or knowledge of those actions.

The idea that the management of a company could not be responsible for something done by that company (which, e.g. could have resulted in considerable savings for the company and its shareholders) is simply ludicrous.

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There is several layers of leadership. The CEO might say, we need to make a product in this price range, and meeting the new regulations. Several layers below him, are the managers, that goes into the nitty gritty details of the engine and know what the engineers are doing. Is the CEO reponsible if the manager cheated and deliberately hid facts from the upper management, just to please them and make himself look better?

You could argue that they should have a seperate control instance, but that was what they had, and they cheated it anyway.

> Is the CEO reponsible if the manager cheated and deliberately hid facts from the upper management, just to please them and make himself look better?

Morally, certainly yes, that’s why they’re the CEO. Their only defence against responsibility is incapacity to fulfil their duties, in which case they should resign immediately.

It is naive to believe a CEO can know about everything. The job is to get out of the habit of running the company day to day, and focus on vision, strategy, and culture. It is entirely possible for the management levels below him to ignore orders, and cheat measures out in place to ensure this. As long as the CEO act accordingly when knowledge about this reaches him, he is doing a proper job. It will never be possible to totally control things with an orginazation so large that you need several layers of management. You do put trust into the lower layers, no matter how you do it.

Right, but the CEO needs to instill a culture of not cheating. If the CEO has that culture (and can show it - lots of ethics training and other decisions that reinforce the idea that the company doesn't violate those rules) then you go down the chain to the rouge manager who hid his action.

This isn't just a theory. On of my companies competitors (I do not know which, I was just given it as an example) was caught bribing officials in China. After investigation it was decided that it was a rouge manager and not the CEO: they has a policy of not bribing, everyone was trained in recognizing how something (even a meal) could be seen as a bribe, and when other unethical action had been taken in the past the company took action to stop it and treated the whistle-blowers well. The CEO got off because he did everything in his power to ensure this wouldn't happen.

Exactly. Great example of why not to simply punish all the way to the top because they're "morally responsible".

Exactly! We need to stop questioning if the leaders are responsible. They are! The CEO is responsible for the whole company. If something bad happens, and he doesn't know about it he is still responsible. He is responsible for knowing, and he failed to find out. We need to put the CEO on the side of the law.

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