A damn shame. Is the motto 'If it ain't Boeing, I ain't going' no longer valid?!
Posted on 11/23/2019 3:26:49 PM PST by Rummyfan
The flight that put the Boeing Company on course for disaster lifted off a few hours after sunrise. 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 crew had prepared three flight plans: one to Denver. One to Dallas. And one to Chicago.
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. But it was May 2001. 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. How much distance? This flight—a PR stunt to end the two-month contest for Boeing’s new headquarters—would reveal the answer. Once the plane was airborne, Boeing announced it would be landing at Chicago’s Midway International Airport.
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. Boeing’s top management plus staff—roughly 500 people in all—would work here. They could see the boats plying the Chicago River and the trains rumbling over it. Condit, an opera lover, would have an easy walk to the Lyric Opera building. But the nearest Boeing commercial-airplane assembly facility would be 1,700 miles away.
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
A damn shame. Is the motto 'If it ain't Boeing, I ain't going' no longer valid?!
I worked at Boeing at the time and remember Phil Conditvas looking like a real life Homer Simpson.
Phil Condit
I work for Boeing. Interesting place.
ChIraQ is the last place Boeing should be headquartered.
Somebody was Bogarting a big one.
Same culture disruption doomed Westinghouse and GE.
Not an uncommon story once businesses become large.
Xerox, HP, IBM....
Boeing is FAR more concerned with “diversity” than quality.
Well, at least Dallas got an Opera house out of the deal.
Well, at least Dallas got an Opera house out of the deal.
.
Illinois was a bad choice.
Illinois was a bad choice.
Great article. Thanks.
Boeing was run by engineers, banks were run by bankers, insurance companies by insurance people, airlines by flyboys and on and on and on. Now they are all run by ‘managers’ and offer lousy, expensive products which are not what the customers really want.
Read this article, best summary of the “cult” I have ever seen!
https://www.airspacemag.com/daily-planet/nasas-new-mission-and-the-cult-of-management-155873900/
Interesting that you say this. This is off topic so I hope I dont get flamed. Back in the 80s my uncle was still working construction in NYC. He was a laborer shop steward. He worked on several Trump jobs. Trump was starting to be news in the city back then. My uncle said whenever Trump came on a job the first place he went was where the work was being done. The first guys he spoke with were the workers not the bosses.
Our society in toto has been run by technocrats, managers and “experts” since the 1960s. Time for the experiment to end.
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