Boeing, profit engineering and the destruction of value
Boeing: how not to run a national champion
The ongoing Boeing story (from the FT).
It’s not a surprise – late in life, even Welch realised that the focus on shareholder returns had been a mistake – or as he pithily put it “shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world” and that you build value for shareholders by building a good company and a good product.
Comment by BrassMonkey
Well this is what happens when you lay-off or demotivate a significant proportion of the layer of highly competent technical experts in a technology and manufacturing company. These Fellows and Senior Engineer meeting leads are the unsung glue that holds a business like Boeing on course. Ensuring it stays true to the well established aerospace principles while maintaining productivity and fighting the corner for technical professionalism against the onslaught of profit engineering . These seasoned experts ‘set the culture’ on the shop floors and ensured that it was maintained across B2B interfaces. Boeing has a serious problem of leaders that find their ways to the top who do not have technical or manufacturing backgrounds. This is in stark contrast to Airbus, where a significant number of their executive team have risen through the ranks building aircraft and factories. One sentence to sum up the whole problem. Top management don’t care about safety, they will cite “shareholder returns”, they don’t want to know about the issues just build lots of planes, do it quickly and make them cheap
Comment by Super Hank Petram
It’s not fixable. They have just appointed a new CEO-designate to succeed Calhoun. She is an accountant.
Medicine and health care is far, far, worse.