Column: Boeing's board shouldn't escape blame in 737 Max scandal

This may have been overlooked, but the Boeing board of directors did Wells Fargo a big favor in 2019; it provided Wells' directors with real competition in the race for the worst failure of leadership among major American corporate boards.

The failure came, of course, from an epic disaster: two crashes of Boeing's 737 Max airliners, costing the lives of 346 passengers and crew members. The crashes have been attributed to slipshod engineering, irresponsible cost-cutting and sweetheart arrangements with government regulators - all aspects of management that fall within the board's jurisdiction.

The most striking indication of the board's dereliction of duty isn't that the crashes and their underlying factors occurred in the first place, but that the directors didn't leap into action after the first crash, in October 2018, or immediately after the second, in March. That suggests that the Boeing board didn't view its responsibilities as extending beyond the company's bottom line to its other stakeholders - including the airlines as its direct clients and the flying public as its ultimate customers.

"The board took no action after the first crash," observes the veteran corporate governance expert Nell Minow. "That's unforgivable."

In the same sense, the Wells Fargo board appeared to view the eruption of underhanded business practices in its retail banking