The Hewlett-Packard pretexting scandal, where board members were lying and spying, will go down as one of the big ethical meltdowns of 2006.

It also has some profound lessons for corporate governance and boards around the world.

You can hear an interesting discussion of what went wrong by listening in to WP Carey School of business professor of legal and ethical studies Marianne Jennings here.

Jennings talks about how organisations like HP allowed things to run out of control and about the danger signs. Lessons there for directors at all companies.

A good print discussion of it here.

The key, as Jennings said, is to talk about the "elephant in the room" before things get out of control.