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> First there is no way to falsify that assertion. It is completely unfalsifiable and unscientific. Sure there is. If all the management at Boeing stayed in c
by tw04 6y ago
> First there is no way to falsify that assertion. It is completely unfalsifiable and unscientific.
Sure there is. If all the management at Boeing stayed in charge, there would be no MD executives and management to have tarnished Boeing's culture. But that's not what happened. MD DID take over management and DID change the culture.
>Second, there is no one from McDonnell here to defend them. This assertion is at best innuendo and at worst defamatory and tars McDonnell unfairly.
Really? It was pretty widely known throughout the industry what MD's culture and management was like. There's nobody to "defend them" because they considered the behavior perfectly acceptable.
>Let's say that the merger was the cause of all the evil. So what? Really, so what. The shareholders and employees of the combined entity have reaped the benefit of the merger for two decades.
So... I would hope we as a species realize there are limits to profit at all cost and learn from it??
As for proof, all you need to do look back to the mid-90s. I remember what a mess MD was, it's not hard to research.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1995/12/17/celebrating-a-turnaround/2fce3183-919d-4bcc-95af-8353487365a5/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1995/12/17/c...
Highlights include:
>All aerospace firms are cutting costs to match declining orders, but McDonnell Douglas does it with an unmatched aggression. It has shed 52 percent of its work force over the past seven years, dropping to 63,000 employees.
>Stonecipher defines one of his key roles as "making sure we employ not one person more than we absolutely need." He insists that company managers cut costs yearly, with "zero allowance for inflation."
Cutting costs to absolute 0 doesn't allow for a culture of quality and craftsmanship, period. Taking time and doing things right has excess spend by definition.
- wahern 6y ago> Sure there is. If all the management at Boeing stayed in charge, there would be no MD executives and management to have tarnished Boeing's culture. But that's not what happened. MD DID take over management and DID change the culture. The problem with this narrative is that Boeing CEO/President/Chairman Philip Condit knew precisely what he was doing when he sought the merger. The board had elevated him precisely to make a strategic move like that--in fact, to make that particular move. And most importantly the board knowingly chose the financial pitches of the McDonnell Douglas executives over the protests of the more risk-averse Boeing CFO Givans and his faction. Givans was pushed out shortly after the merger by Condit and the board, including original Boeing board members. (See https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=19980715&slug=2761320 https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=19980715&slug... Unfortunately I can't find some of the more informative contemporaneous accounts that explain it better.) All of which is to say, Boeing's engineering-first culture was already on the way out before the merger. Yes, McDonnell Douglas executives ended up winning the power struggles, but that was Condit's and the board's plan from the get go. McDonnell Douglas was the vehicle, not the instigator. But top Boeing leadership didn't want too much spectacle because they needed to keep stringing along a handful of board members and major investors who were wary of the strategic and cultural shifts.