What has gone disastrously wrong with Boeing
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...
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...
Insider: At its core, we have a marginalization of the people who build stuff, the people who really work on these planes...
So, right now, we have an executive council running the company that is all outsiders... The headquarters in Arlington is empty...
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...
DEI is the drop you put in the bucket, and the whole bucket changes. It is anti-excellence... 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...
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... 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...
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...
Related
Boeing’s Uncontrolled Descent, by Charles Wing-Uexkull, IM 1776, 18 March 2024:
... management is rearranging deck chairs to make them more diverse. In 2022, Boeing tied managers’ incentive compensation to the ‘diversity’ of their interview slates, meaning that their bonuses depended on whether or not they considered women, racial minorities, and the disabled for positions they were hiring for. In Boeing’s Global Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (GEDI) 2023 Report, Sara Bowen, vice president of GEDI, Talent Intelligence, and Employee Listening, wrote: “We know diversity must be at the table for every important decision our company makes — every challenge we face, every innovation we design. Equity, diversity and inclusion are core values because they make Boeing — and each of us individually — better.”
The GEDI report boasted that racial and ethnic minorities now hold 41.4% of all jobs in U.S. Boeing Commercial Airplanes, 28.3% of all jobs in Defense, Space, & Security, and 38.2% of all jobs in Global Services. Minorities accounted for 47.5% of all new hires in 2022, and 34.4% of all promotions. More Boeing employees are disabled — in 2022, 7.7% of Boeing employees had a disability, up 1.3 points from the previous year, the report noted. The proportion of military veterans at the company, on the other hand, is declining.
But DEI is only part of the problem. Historically, Boeing has achieved great results by centralizing authority and control in the hands of the most exceptionally talented engineers. Today, the culture at Boeing is the opposite: listening sessions with the downtrodden, coddling the broken, and tiptoeing around the oppressed...
Two Boeing Whistleblowers Allege Disregarded Worker Concerns, Pressure For Speed, Slashdot, 15 April 2024.
Boeing Whistleblower Says Company Is Involved in a 'Criminal Cover-up', Gizmodo, 17 April 2024.
Video: Dr. Phil Destroys DEI Advocate In Under 40 Seconds, Vigalant Fox, 10 April 2024. "That’s been tried. That didn't work. That was called Marxism."