“It’s an Empty Executive Suite”
An insider explains what has gone disastrously wrong with Boeing.1/2
CHRISTOPHER F. RUFO APR 05, 2024
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 alienationbetween 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 nearly all outsiders. The CEO is a General Electric guy, as is the CFO he brought in. And we had a completely new HR leader, with no background at Boeing. There are now no engineers as part of the core team. The head of our commercial business in Seattle who was recently fired was the only engineer 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 heads of HR and communications live 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 is just another set of assets. At some point, you cannot recover with process what you have lost with love. And I think that is probably the most real story of them all.There is no visible center of the company and people are wondering what they are connected to.
https://christopherrufo.com/p/its-an-empty-executive-suite