And the problem is that a few years back a cadre of executives having no cultural or hereditary relationship to the Renton Culture decided that they needed to remove themselves from the sweaty stench of the managers and workers.
They moved off to Chicago and began thinking great thoughts in tall buildings.
They did that because they weren't Boeing people.
They were McDonnell Douglas people who came to Boeing in the Boeing buyout of McDonnell Douglas.
They knew nothing of Boeing and its history, heritage and culture: great organized labor, great entrepreneurial management and great get-your-hands-on-the-products-and-processes executives, all three of whom were imbued with deep scientific curiosity, engineering ability and fanatic commitment to quality, and a mutual respect for and intense belief in the team.
McDonnell Douglas people came from an environment of cost-plus DOD contracts: you get paid whether or not you deliver quality, whether or not you deliver it on time, and at a price established by adding an outrageous uplift to an already bloated "cost".
Financially that's a hard environment to fail in.
Trying to transfer that method to a Boeing passenger plane is both impossible, and has been proven to be, disastrous.
The main solution to the problem of crashing passenger planes, midair fuselage failures, de-icers that can only be run for five minutes or the engines might blow up and vertical stabilizers that might not work right has been for the thinkers of great thoughts in tall buildings to move from Chicago to Washington DC.
Until that crowd are either fired or retired and Boeing returns to its heritage, Boeing will continue to lose market share and leave the way open for China to be the only competitor to Airbus.
And unfortunately, there may be more mid-air disasters and deaths waiting to occur in the interim on the company's path to oblivion.
No comments:
Post a Comment