The independent governance review into Qantas is a pretty light touch … lots of nice words about some pretty bad behaviour.

But there are a few key swings, mainly at the poor decision-making of a rarely-questioned CEO and the timidity of a board that didn’t ask enough hard questions and let him do whatever he decided to.

Page 3: “…mistakes were made and, as the Governance Review has highlighted, in some cases, the responses of the Board and Management were a contributing factor.”

Page 6: from Qantas’ provided “context” ahead of the independent advisor’s report…

“Leadership style — top-down leadership with a dominant and trusted CEO, leading to insufficient listening and low speak up”

“Corporate governance — the Board’s mode of engagement with management did not always achieve the right balance between support and challenge”

And a breadcrumb for the media who’d get blasted when they accurately reported Qantas troubles:

“External communications — external communications were at times combative which exacerbated issues.”

Back to the report, which opens with probably its heaviest hit.

Page 9:

“There was too much deference to a long-tenured CEO who had endured and overcome multiple past operational and financial crises. The mode of engagement between the Board and Management did not always facilitate robust challenges on some issues. Issues could have been brought to the Board earlier for input and reporting could have included more analysis of options and risks for Board debate.

“The Board was collegiate in their approach. This should be complemented by more ‘tough but fair’ debate and challenge.”

Anything that wasn’t linked to safety was dealt with as a single issue. So the huge reputational problems got … out of hand.

Page 12:

“There was a tendency for emerging risks, particularly non-financial risks, to be assessed on an individual, rather than cumulative basis, with the result that the overall impact of potential combined risk actualisation may be underestimated in assessments and contingency planning.”

Page 14:

On anything other than safety no-one could out-shout Mr Joyce.

“Leadership culture is part of the root cause dynamic that has underpinned the events under review. The Group had a ‘command and control’ leadership style with centralised decisions and an experienced and dominant CEO. This contributed to a top-down culture, which impacted empowerment and a willingness to challenge or ‘speak up’ on issues or decisions of concern except in relation to safety matters.”

And they couldn’t see it

“In turn, that cultural characteristic underpinned some of the events that affected the Group’s reputation. The Board had limited visibility or appreciation of the manifestation of this cultural characteristic. The Board overly extrapolated the strong top-to-bottom safety culture to be representative of the broader leadership culture.”

Also called out, a needlessly combative relationship with staff, contractors, unions and regulators

Page 16:

“The company often had an adversarial approach to engagement with key stakeholders and external communications”

In the company’s response to each of these findings, it says it has appointed new people to deal with this and re-set the relationships:

“Stakeholder relationship owners have been established to undertake re-sets with key stakeholders”

Page 17:

Qantas didn’t listen enough to customers:

“The Governance Review found that there was not enough focus on customers (in feedback mechanisms, in reporting, in incentives, in discussions, in decision making, in governance) which hampered Qantas’ ability to ‘do the right thing’ for customers”

“Adverse leading customer indicators warrant immediate attention, as much as adverse financial and operational signals.”

There was no good process to raise issues from customers. There were only “trailing indicators”.

(This somewhat ignores the many, many media articles about their problems and the thousands of customers taking to social media to try and find their luggage/flight).

Page 18:

Paying money based on the wrong things:

“Incentives were heavily focused on financial performance and less on customers and reputation. The Group Scorecard did not achieve the right balance between employee, customer and shareholder expectations.”