Posted on 04/05/2024 6:57:41 AM PDT by MtnClimber
Boeing is—or was—a great company. From its manufacturing plants in Seattle, it produced the world’s most reliable, efficient aircraft. But after merging with McDonnell Douglas, shifting production around the world, and moving its headquarters to Chicago and then Arlington, Virginia, the Boeing Company has been adrift.
Then, in October 2018, one of Boeing’s new 737 MAX aircraft crashed. Then, a few months later, another. Recent months have seen embarrassing maintenance failures, including a door plug that blew off an Alaska Airlines plane in mid-flight.
To help explain what went wrong, I have been speaking with a Boeing insider who has direct knowledge of the company’s leadership decisions. He tells a story of elite dysfunction, financial abstraction, and a DEI bureaucracy that has poisoned the culture, creating a sense of profound alienation between the people who occupy the executive suite and those who build the airplanes.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Christopher Rufo: I am hoping you can set the stage. In general terms, what is happening at Boeing?
Insider: At its core, we have a marginalization of the people who build stuff, the people who really work on these planes.
In 2018, the first 737 MAX crash that happened, that was an engineering failure. We built a single-point failure in a system that should have no single-point failures. Then a second crash followed. A company cannot survive two crashes from a single aircraft type. Then-CEO Dennis Muilenburg defended the company in front of Congress, defended the engineering, defended the work—and that protected the workforce, but it also prodded the board and stoked public fear, which resulted in a sweeping set of changes that caused huge turnover in talent.
So, right now, we have an executive council running the company that is all outsiders. The current CEO is a General Electric guy, as is the CFO whom he brought in. And we have a completely new HR leader, with no background at Boeing. The head of our commercial-airplanes unit in Seattle, who was fired last week, was one of the last engineers in the executive council.
The headquarters in Arlington is empty. Nobody lives there. It is an empty executive suite. The CEO lives in New Hampshire. The CFO lives in Connecticut. The head of HR lives in Orlando. We just instituted a policy that everyone has to come into work five days a week—except the executive council, which can use the private jets to travel to meetings. And that is the story: it is a company that is under caretakers. It is not under owners. And it is not under people who love airplanes.
In this business, the workforce knows if you love the thing you are building or if it’s just another set of assets to you. At some point, you cannot recover with process what you have lost with love. And I think that is probably the most important story of all. There is no visible center of the company, and people are wondering what they are connected to.
Rufo: If they have lost the love of building airplanes, what is the love, if any, that they bring to the job?
Insider: Status games rule every boardroom in the country. The DEI narrative is a very real thing, and, at Boeing, DEI got tied to the status game. It is the thing you embrace if you want to get ahead. It became a means to power.
DEI is the drop you put in the bucket, and the whole bucket changes. It is anti-excellence, because it is ill-defined, but it became part of the culture and was tied to compensation. Every HR email is: “Inclusion makes us better.” This kind of politicization of HR is a real problem in all companies.
If you look at the bumper stickers at the factories in Renton or Everett, it’s a lot of conservative people who like building things—and conservative people do not like politics at work.
The radicalization of HR doesn’t hurt tech businesses like it hurts manufacturing businesses. At Google, they’re making a large profit margin and pursuing very progressive hiring policies. Because they are paying 30 percent or 40 percent more than the competition in salary, they are able to get the top 5 percent of whatever racial group they want. They can afford, in a sense, to pay the “DEI tax” and still find top people.
But this can be catastrophic in lower-margin or legacy companies. You are playing musical chairs, and if you do the same things that Google is doing, you are going to end up with the bottom 20 percent of the preferred population.
Rufo: What else does the public not understand about what is happening at Boeing?
Insider: Boeing is just a symptom of a much bigger problem: the failure of our elites. The purpose of the company is now “broad stakeholder value,” including DEI and ESG. This was then embraced as a means to power, which further separated the workforce from the company. And it is ripping our society apart.
Boeing is the most visible example because every problem—like, say, a bolt that falls off—gets amplified. But this is happening everywhere around us, and it is going to have a huge effect. DEI and ESG became a way to stop talking honestly to employees.
We need to tear off the veil of all this coded language that is being used everywhere, and our elites need to recover some sense of service to people. They think they have it already because they are reciting these shibboleths of moral virtue: “I am serving because I am repeating what everyone else is saying about DEI.” It’s a form of cheap self-love that is being embraced by leaders. If you pay the tax to the DEI gods or the ESG gods and use coded language with your workforce, it absolves you of the hard work of really leading.
No. Service means you are spending the extra time to understand what’s really happening in the factory and in your supply chain. There should be some honor in understanding that we inherited something beautiful and good and worth loving.
My mom’s late brother (2019) worked at Boeing for the bulk of his career. He would know believe what it has become today.
The globalists know exactly how Fascism works. They've already stretched their tentacles into "easier" industries. The technical ones such as high-end manufacturing are more difficult but the globalists don't care as long as they gain control of them.
Boeing doesn't exist to manufacture airplanes. They manufacture airplanes as an extension of government, government designed to control you.
True dat.
Boeing doesn’t exist to manufacture airplanes. They manufacture airplanes as an extension of government, government designed to control you.
https://cdn.mises.org/the_vampire_economy_20201022.pdf
Doing business under fascism.
An easy read. Pick a chapter that appeals to you.
I believe that you are spot on. My advisor in college was chief engineer for Allison Division of General Motors when he retired and became an engineering professor. He always emphasized that you need to really love the industry you are working in to succeed and for the company to prosper. GM was a very successful company when it was managed by people from the engineering ranks. GM’s demise started when the bean counters took over management of the company.
The “Woke stuff” is all government imposed.
Half of Boeing business is government. If you don’t act the way they want, you lose business. So it’s go along to get along. The Cult Marx gangsters rule everyone.
Doesn’t absolve Calhoun and his GE Finance gangbangers. They’re the bane of the aviation world. And it doesn’t negate your comment about the soulless MBA’s. But the big Kahuna is the weight of the rabid anti-White federal government.
You don’t get flyweight “engineer” Howard McKenzie as Chief Engineer or equally flyweight “COO” Stephanie Pope in charge of BCA for God’s sake without pandering. But that pandering is all about appeasing the Obama gangster state.
If and when that crap were to stop they might recover, but they seem to have doubled down. Most likely they were blackmailed by OBiden: fall on your sword, promote the DEI gang, and we will pull back on the penalties, maybe even add some contracts on the MIL side. So they did.
Won’t save them in the commercial market. The insurers will see to that.
That is so true. I love all the aircraft I worked on. When I see one on a static display, I cannot help but run my hand gently over the skin. I see the anti-smash lights and the wing tip lens glazed over with age, which makes me sad. Sometimes, I can poke my head in the wheel well and still smell that JP-5 exhaust mixed with grease and naugahyde odor (pilots and maintenance people know the odor I speak of) that is so common on military aircraft. Then, just for a moment, it is 1981, and I am on the flight line with my tool kit.
A man can not have two masters. This is what I noticed about groups long ago: they can only have one focus, one goal. As soon as they add a goal, their attention is divided and neither goal is reached; often the group will break up altogether.
Once you hire woke you introduce a cancer into the company. Woke will agitate instead of producing. They will only hire other woke regardless of best qualifications. They will drive out productive workers who don’t want to put up with the woke nonsense. Like a cancer it cannot be reasoned with or appeased. The only hope is, like cancer, to burn, cut, or poison it out and hope you don’t kill the host in the process.
If any two industries on Earth must be run by high-quality and specialized individuals, it's medicine and aircraft manufacture/operation.
Lives count on the results
CH-47s, AH-1s, UH-60s, CH-53s, and a few fixed-wings along the way...
to put it bluntly, all the white guys with crew cuts thin ties white shirts and slide rules have walked out leaving the math is racist crowd and their phones to figure out how a bumblebee flies.
Boeing’s plight is a metaphor for the incremental rot and decay of the Union government and by extension American society. Or is it the other way around?
Very well said.
I started working in a production machine shop in 1971. The shop had a dozen Warner & Swasey turret lathes, mostly WWII vintage. Despite having been run for thousands of hours the machines had held up very well.
In 1985 I set up one of those old lathes for a precision finish-boring job and managed to hold less than 0.002” total variation in diameter when boring a 19” long workpiece. Pretty good for a machine built in Cleveland in 1943.
We used to make some of the very best machine tools in the world.
In 1994 I set up an American 32” engine lathe for a different boring operation. This newly-purchased machine had been in government standby storage since the early 1950s and was in essentially new condition. After performing test-cutting and final leveling I bored a 30” long billet and had less than 0.001” diameter variation overall.
We used to make some of the very best machine tools in the world.
By moving into the shadow of both the Pentagon and Congress, Boeing seems to be signaling it has lost the commercial race to Airbus and wants to be seen as primarily a defense and space contractor.
The fact that the announcement comes the same week Airbus (EADSF) revealed it’s increasing production of commercial jets at its factory in Mobile, Alabama, only seems to drive home that point.
“One company is saying ‘We’re going to build lots of jets.’ The other is saying ‘We’re going to lobby the Pentagon and Congress for defense dollars.’ It’s a big contrast,” said Richard Aboulafia, managing director at AeroDynamic Advisory and a leading aerospace analyst.
“Sometimes, I can poke my head in the wheel well and still smell that JP-5 exhaust mixed with grease and naugahyde odor...Then, just for a moment, it is 1981, and I am on the flight line with my tool kit.”
The F-4 Phantom, AKA “Double Ugly”. The 1980s. Flying with guy who had flown in Vietnam.
Sigh.
In some fields, love doesn’t matter. But in flying?
And thanks for the memories. I sometimes had issues with my senior officers, but the guys on the flightline were awesome!
Well, GE was never in the machine tool business, except that they produced computer controls for them. But yes, the American industry built machines that would last, and could be rebuilt again and again. It would never surprise me to see a 40 or 50 year old Bullard still at work making jet engine parts or fuel pumps for Musk's rocket engines.
Well, GE was never in the machine tool business, except that they produced computer controls for them. But yes, the American industry built machines that would last, and could be rebuilt again and again. It would never surprise me to see a 40 or 50 year old Bullard still at work making jet engine parts or fuel pumps for Musk's rocket engines.
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