The Long-Forgotten Flight That Sent Boeing Off Course

tags

Boeing

Notes

decided it was time to put some distance between themselves and the people actually making the company’s planes.

NOTER_PAGE: (2 0.05810147299509002 . 0.11228813559322035)

the nearest Boeing commercial-airplane facility would be 1,700 miles away.

NOTER_PAGE: (2 0.21194762684124388 . 0.07627118644067797)

“When the headquarters is located in to a principal business—as ours was in Seattle—the corporate is inevitably drawn into day-to-day business operations,” Condit explained

NOTER_PAGE: (2 0.27086743044189854 . 0.1408898305084746)

737 Max disaster can be traced back two decades—to the moment Boeing’s leadership decided to divorce itself from the firm’s own culture.

NOTER_PAGE: (2 0.34206219312602293 . 0.5370762711864406)

For about 80 years, Boeing basically functioned as an association of engineers. Its executives held patents, designed wings, spoke the language of engineering and safety as a mother tongue. Finance wasn’t a primary language.

NOTER_PAGE: (2 0.3911620294599018 . 0.06991525423728813)

it was McDonnell executives who perversely ended up in charge of the combined entity, and it was McDonnell’s culture that became ascendant. “McDonnell Douglas bought Boeing with Boeing’s money,” went the joke around Seattle.

NOTER_PAGE: (2 0.5531914893617021 . 0.2065677966101695)

Engineers were all too happy to share such views with executives, which made for plenty of awkward encounters in the still-smallish city that was Seattle in the ’90s.

NOTER_PAGE: (2 0.9083469721767594 . 0.07627118644067797)

Boeing’s managers would now have the added challenge of flying all this blind—or by instrument, as it were—relying on remote readouts of the situation in Chicago instead of eyeballing it directly (as good pilots are incidentally trained to do).

NOTER_PAGE: (3 0.295417348608838 . 0.3919491525423729)

Condit was forced out and replaced with Stonecipher, who promptly affirmed: “When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it’s run like a business rather than a great engineering firm.”

NOTER_PAGE: (3 0.44926350245499186 . 0.21822033898305085)

“It was the ability to comfortably interact with an engineer who in turn feels comfortable telling you their reservations, versus calling a manager [more than] 1,500 miles away who you know has a reputation for wanting to take your pension away. It’s a very different dynamic. As a recipe for disempowering engineers in particular, you couldn’t come up with a better format.”

NOTER_PAGE: (3 0.7487725040916531 . 0.4375)

“There’s one thing that made Boeing really great all the way along. They always understood that they were an engineering-driven company, not a financially driven company . If they’re no longer honoring that as their central mission, then over time they’ll just become another company.”

NOTER_PAGE: (4 0.30851063829787234 . 0.7574152542372882)