In 1995, two years before he came back to run Apple, Steve Jobs made an interesting point.
He was asked why Apple (which fired him a decade earlier) was struggling. He said it was because the then-CEO, John Sculley, came from Pepsico. I.e., he was a marketing and branding guy, not a product guy, and not an engineer… In other words, Apple was now being run by marketing and branding people, not engineers.
As we said last year, It’s one thing to learn everything there is to learn about being a surgeon. It’s another thing entirely to actually be one. This holds true for most jobs. We can empathize all day long, but there’s little substitute for direct experience.
Perhaps something similar explains why Boeing has been in the news so much lately, mostly for the wrong reasons.
Boeing’s problems began in 2001, when they moved their corporate HQ away from their engineering hub (Seattle) to the international corporate hub (i.e. Chicago, which had also offered them massive tax breaks), and then shifted again in 2022 to Arlington, Virginia (less than a mile from the Pentagon, and only a few miles from Congress, the Senate and the halls of power).
One could easily conclude that along the way, “building” became less of an end in itself, and more of a means to other things, like shareholder value and political power.
In April, our CEO, Jason Korman wrote that Boeing’s toxic culture was the main reason for their woes.
Wall Street Silver summed it up nicely, tweeting:
“Boeing used to be a great company dominated by engineers. The people at the top were engineers as their core foundation and education.
The downfall of the company began a few decades ago when the leadership was captured by finance guys. The current CEO has a degree in accounting.
Ever since then, Boeing has been in a slow decline.”
Elon Musk concurred, retweeting and adding:
“The CEO of an aircraft company should know how to design aircraft, not spreadsheets.”
Soon after that, Elon announced that his company, Space X, had just won a massive contract with NASA, unlike Boeing, who’s currently having a bad week with NASA (coincidence?).
And now Boeing is in the news yet again, this time accepting a felony plea deal with the DOJ for fraud connected to its 737-Max crashes.
This isn’t just toxicity – this is systemic toxicity. Yes, everyone gets unlucky sometimes, but nobody gets this unlucky unless they are stuck with a fundamentally toxic culture.
Culling the C-Suite won’t fix it. Nothing less than a complete cultural transformation will work.
As Jason wrote, “When shareholders demand proof that culture change is happening, they’ll help Boeing finally move in the right direction.”
