Cummins Inc.'s CEO Reads His Firm's Ethics Investigation Reports - All 400 of Them, Ethikos Reports

MAMARONECK, N.Y., Sept. 28 /PRNewswire/ -- Details matter. That applies when drawing a contract, furnishing a house, or designing a health care plan. It's also true when managing an ethics and compliance program.

That insight hasn't been lost on Cummins, Inc. (Columbus, IN), the storied manufacturer of diesel engines.

About 10 years ago, the $11 billion company stationed 10 "master investigators" around the world to manage investigations into alleged ethics violations involving Cummins' employees.

The investigators report to Sondra K. Bolte, who helped develop the network and is the closest thing that Cummins has to an ethics officer. Last year the company conducted some 800 investigations, half of which were substantiated.

There is nothing particularly unusual in this.

What sets Cummins apart from most other large companies, however, is that each substantiated investigation summary—a single report typically runs one to two pages—is read by Cummins Inc.'s chairman and CEO, Tim Solso.

"Mr. Miller taught me a long time ago that the only way you really know what's going on in your company is to walk the shop floor or the research labs," Solso tells the bimonthly publication Ethikos in its current issue. "The company today is too big to do this, so reading these individual investigation reports is one way of learning about what's going in the organization at a grassroots level and how we are responding. It's important that I know that." Solso was referring to J. Irwin Miller, the company's long-time leader—and mentor to generations of Cummins leaders.

How, why, and where Cummins Inc. manages and monitors its ethics investigations function is the subject of the lead story in Ethikos' September/October 2010 issue. (The article can be viewed online at http://EthikosPublication.com/html/cummins.html.)

"I go back to Mr. Miller who said that when someone is mistreated, you want to have a sense of outrage. I have a sense of outrage, and have had throughout my entire career, about these types of things," says Solso.

Now in its 24th year, Ethikos (www.EthikosPublication.com) takes a unique case-study approach to corporate ethics. Recent issues have included profiles of General Electric, Fluor, Coca-Cola, Cisco, McDonald's, British Telecom, Tyco, Duke Energy, KPMG, and Novartis, among others. To see selected recent articles go to: http://www.ethikospublication.com/html/selectedarticles.html.

SOURCE Ethikos