It seems the regulatory process matters rather less than the character of the CEO, even in aviation.....But how do ordinary mortals get a clue about that aspect
By working for the organisation yourself is the only sure fire way, scuttlebutt will abound, but you can never be sure if the teller of the story is telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, or if the story may be tainted by the story tellers experience due to a clash of personalities or some such. The CEO may not have a handle on the actual aircraft operation, think big airline, or oil company in our case. Our company had a manual dictating the standards expected to be applied/met by any aviation contractor or the company owned operation. On at least one occasion the story filtered down that when the in country CEO asked the aviation adviser for advice relevant to what was said in the manual he was told being the CEO you can do what you like. The CEO would have found a hip pocket in a singlet of far more use.
The interesting part is we used to be audited to death by all and sundry, but no one ever picked up on glaring fault lines in the operation, it would have only taken a cursory inspection of the flight planning regimen.
Remember flying a group of company oversea VIP's out to a rig in crap weather and overhearing one of them comment to another "I thought this was a VFR operation", no, just a regular day at the office. It just reinforced how out of touch management was with what takes place at the coal face, if you want a properly run (and legal) operation you have to give the people the necessary tools, that requires, you the company, to open your wallet and not fret about the budget and your personal climb up the greasy pole..