Posted on 03/16/2024 7:44:34 AM PDT by CondoleezzaProtege
…Yeah, things aren’t looking good for the plane manufacturer. And we must ask — where did it all go so wrong for Boeing?
Well, it probably all began in the summer of 1997.
Boeing wanted to establish dominance and show the world who was boss in the airline industry. So it decided to acquire another plane manufacturer called McDonnell Douglas. It was a massive merger worth $14 billion.
Now after the merger, the new entity retained the Boeing name. It was expected since it was Boeing that splashed the cash. But the problem was that the culture of McDonnell Douglas seeped in. And that changed the face of Boeing completely.
See, the Boeing of the pre-merger era was called an ‘engineers’ company’. The ones who made these flying machines called the shots. Costs didn’t matter and it was only quality and design that did. They wanted to ensure that only their best ideas took to the skies. Safety was paramount. And the Chief Financial Officer who was answerable to Wall Street about costs didn’t care much about trying to impress the bankers either.
But after the merger, everything changed.
The CEO of McDonnell Douglas actually became the CEO of Boeing. A chairman with no aviation background, but who’d worked in General Electric, was also appointed. The company started paying attention to creating shareholder value which was hardly a priority earlier. And as one article put it, “Now, a passion for great planes was replaced with a passion for affordability.” Boeing even turned to outsourcing critical operations. Sure, it made the balance sheet ‘asset light’, but, it came at the cost of quality…
(Excerpt) Read more at finshots.in ...
Make America Great Again. It’s not blaming capitalism. It’s blaming the corruption of commitment to quality and patriotic purpose that underpinned a company that once embodied American greatness and innovation. Corporatism has overruled free markets. Boeing is in bed with the state and is starting to operate like a Soviet airliner.
Didn’t Welch push Six Sigma on GE employees? That was a floater in the kiddie pool if there ever was one!
Who wrote this article, a middle schooler?
Sounds exactly like Raytheon-Hughes. God knows what happened with United Technologies.
Totally agree with you.
You need to think at a deeper level.
You wouldn’t have any DEI crap if the engineers still ran Boeing. The MacDoug take-over brought in the DEI.
But the MacDoug take-over booted the engineers and ultimately ushered in DEI.
It’s not DEI. It’s managerialism and sort term financial finagling. DEI is a problem, but it is not the problem here. This is just old time destruciton of long term quality for short term profit. Always works until it all collapses.
“just the flavor of the month”
The very worst industry afflicted by that is K-12 education. Every year, a new fad emerges from the “education” departments at universities and is promptly adopted by school districts everywhere. Every new fad is promised as the panacea that will fix failing education and improve score. Every new fad requires the complete upheaval and rejection of what teachers had done in previous years. Yet scores continue to plummet.
My sister saw the Administrator/Teacher ratio go up 10X during her 40 years teaching middle school kids. You need lots of administrators to implement every new fad. As that ratio got worse, results got worse.
Rank and yank
Forced ranking
Vitality model
Stack ranking
Well said.
Boeing is a high-profile, Washington DC-highly-influenced-and-controlled company.
They likely suffer from the cancer of politically-inspired wokeism, DEI, political pandering, Wall-street money grubbing, and Fed.gov insider-crony corruption, which infects most once-great American institutions.
And don’t forget Chyna. Without a lengthy internet search i cant find the dates, but 10-15 years ago, Boeing wanted to do business in China. That meant Chinese owning shares and having access to intellectual property. One thing they desperately wanted was the techical parameters for the Boeing wing, which was a military secret at the time.
My recollection is that Boeing got permission to share that data with the Chinese government. What I’d like to know is what negative influence the Chinese may have had over Boeing since that time. Boeing is still somewhat important to US military preparedness.
I've sat in many R&D planning meetings where the mandate was made clear: show me on your long range plan where this proposed investment results in sales within the next three years or it doesn't get funded. This is what managers are measured to, their three year plan, period. And we know that you get what you measure. In this case you get short term gains at the expense of long term growth and sustainability.
Boeing is by far the poster child for DEI going back several decades at least. Going back nearly 20 years ago they had a big, fat, black bitch as a VP who gathered all the executives worldwide at great expense to lecture them on “If you don’t consider every team having at least one black member then you haven’t thought about the ethics!” I think she is still there.
Boeing calls the racists practices of ‘diversity’ as ‘ethics’. They still do.
Boeing call the 3 year plan the LRBP, Long Range Business Plan, except it isn’t long range, and it is all BS as it is subject to change every month.
And its infected them longer and harder BECAUSE they make a living off the DC marxist deep-state and military-industrial complex.
No offense but why would a leftist Clintonista insider like Magaziner show up at your family’s home?
“That’s what I thought also, DEI is the reason why Boeing aircraft are unsafe.”
They work together, DEI adds tremendous ‘overhead’ to all aspects of the work being done and thus forces compromises elsewhere. It’s very similar to the way unions drive up the cost of automobile production in the US, so compromises are made...while Japan doesn’t put up with that crap.
Yep. BDS is highly manipulated by politics.
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