Kenneth Branch was an employee with Lockheed Martin in 1996. At that time Lockheed Martin was competing head-to-head with the Boeing Company for a government contract worth $5 billion. Mr. Branch interviewed for a job in Boeing’s rocket division in 1996 and began employment at Boeing in January 1997.28

The government awarded the contract to Boeing. An internal investigation by Boeing revealed that Mr. Branch and his supervisor, William Erskine, had thousands of pages of proprietary documents from Lockheed Martin, including detailed information about Lockheed Martin’s costs and specifications for the rocket contract. Boeing turned over 11 boxes of documents to Lockheed in 2003, some of which were marked “Proprietary.”

Applying the model on steps for analyzing ethical dilemmas and case studies in business you learned in the “Consider . . .” feature, determine whether there were any ethical breaches in Boeing’s conduct.

The author has performed consulting work for Boeing on changing its ethical culture. Why is this disclosure important in this text? Why is this disclosure important to you?