“There was a little surprise that a guy running a failing company ended up with so much power,” the former Boeing executive vice president Dick Albrecht told me at the time. McDonnell’s stock price had risen fourfold under Stonecipher as he went on a cost-cutting tear, but many analysts feared that this came at the cost of the company’s future competitiveness. But Stonecipher was cutting a Dick Cheney–like figure, blasting the company’s engineers as “arrogant” and spouting Harry Trumanisms (“I don’t give ’em hell I just tell the truth and they think it’s hell”) when they shot back that he was the problem. Condit was still in charge, yes, and told me to ignore the talk that somebody had “captured” him and was holding him “hostage” in his own office. “McDonnell Douglas bought Boeing with Boeing’s money,” went the joke around Seattle. The shift had started three years earlier, with Boeing’s “reverse takeover” of McDonnell Douglas-so-called because it was McDonnell executives who perversely ended up in charge of the combined entity, and it was McDonnell’s culture that became ascendant. In Condit’s office, overlooking Boeing Field, were 54 white roses to celebrate the day’s closing stock price. As late as the mid-’90s, the company’s chief financial officer had minimal contact with Wall Street and answered colleagues’ requests for basic financial data with a curt “Tell them not to worry.”īy the time I visited the company-for Fortune, in 2000-that had begun to change. Even Boeing’s bean counters didn’t act the part. Its executives held patents, designed wings, spoke the language of engineering and safety as a mother tongue. The present 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.įor about 80 years, Boeing basically functioned as an association of engineers. And that statement, more than anything, captures a cardinal truth about the aerospace giant. “When the headquarters is located in proximity to a principal business-as ours was in Seattle-the corporate center is inevitably drawn into day-to-day business operations,” Condit explained at the time. But the nearest Boeing commercial-airplane assembly facility would be 1,700 miles away. Condit, an opera lover, would have an easy walk to the Lyric Opera building. They could see the boats plying the Chicago River and the trains rumbling over it. Boeing’s top management plus staff-roughly 500 people in all-would work here. On the tarmac, Condit stepped out of the jet, made a brief speech, then boarded a helicopter for an aerial tour of Boeing’s new corporate home: the Morton Salt building, a skyscraper sitting just out of the Loop in downtown Chicago. Once the plane was airborne, Boeing announced it would be landing at Chicago’s Midway International Airport. How much distance? This flight-a PR stunt to end the two-month contest for Boeing’s new headquarters-would reveal the answer. And Boeing’s leaders, CEO Phil Condit and President Harry Stonecipher, had decided it was time to put some distance between themselves and the people actually making the company’s planes. In the plane’s trailing vortices was greater Seattle, where the company’s famed engineering culture had taken root where the bulk of its 40,000-plus engineers lived and worked indeed, where the jet itself had been assembled. The crew had prepared three flight plans: one to Denver. It was good flying weather-temperatures in the mid-40s with a slight breeze out of the southeast-but oddly, no one knew where the 737 jetliner was headed. The flight that put the Boeing Company on course for disaster lifted off a few hours after sunrise.
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