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> Boeing sold deadly products under leadership by their engineer CEO. I remember hearing I think in a documentary that the merger with McDonall-Douglas made it

> Boeing sold deadly products under leadership by their engineer CEO. I remember hearing I think in a documentary that the merger with McDonall-Douglas made it have a more business-y culture that lead the the terrible failures.

wahern 4y ago
McDonnell-Douglas is often blamed for changing the Boeing culture, but it was the Boeing CEO Philip Condit who led the deal, and more importantly helped engineer the cultural takeover by strategically placing McDonnell-Douglas executives in key positions. Condit was at one point a lead engineer at Boeing, but was deliberately chosen by the Boeing board (at least the majority faction) precisely because they knew what he wanted to do with the company. The person who pushed back the hardest against the McDonnell-Douglas merger was the Boeing CFO Boyd Givan. He was quickly ousted not long after the deal was finalized, accused of being too financially conservative compared to McDonnell-Douglas' M.O.: https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=19980715&slug=2761320 https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=19980715&slug... The blame ultimately rests with the Boeing board. There was a minority faction on the board that fought tooth-and-nail. They couldn't stop it, but IIRC their concession (to prevent the minority from creating a ruckus in public) was being able to keep Givan as CFO after the merger. But Condit ensured that that didn't last long by undermining Givan at every turn, which was probably the plan of the majority board faction all along. Based on this and a few other anecdotes, and if we're making wild speculations, I'd say that whether a CFO makes a good CEO depends on the type of CFO. There's the traditional CFO--the "bean counter"--whose job is to manage the money and keep a low profile so the rest of the company can do their thing. Then there are the new generations of CFO, which started coming up the ranks in the 1970s and 1980s (see, e.g., McDonnell-Douglas), who see creative accounting (aka financial engineering) as a legitimate way to boost stockholder value and an end in itself, independent of a company's core competency. If a company has good bones, a traditional CFO can make a great steward at the very least. For the new type of CFO, they often couldn't care less about a company's core competency, and are more speculator than bean counter, at least in the traditional meanings of those terms.

wahern 4y ago

McDonnell-Douglas is often blamed for changing the Boeing culture, but it was the Boeing CEO Philip Condit who led the deal, and more importantly helped engineer the cultural takeover by strategically placing McDonnell-Douglas executives in key positions. Condit was at one point a lead engineer at Boeing, but was deliberately chosen by the Boeing board (at least the majority faction) precisely because they knew what he wanted to do with the company. The person who pushed back the hardest against the McDonnell-Douglas merger was the Boeing CFO Boyd Givan. He was quickly ousted not long after the deal was finalized, accused of being too financially conservative compared to McDonnell-Douglas' M.O.: https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=19980715&slug=2761320 https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=19980715&slug... The blame ultimately rests with the Boeing board. There was a minority faction on the board that fought tooth-and-nail. They couldn't stop it, but IIRC their concession (to prevent the minority from creating a ruckus in public) was being able to keep Givan as CFO after the merger. But Condit ensured that that didn't last long by undermining Givan at every turn, which was probably the plan of the majority board faction all along. Based on this and a few other anecdotes, and if we're making wild speculations, I'd say that whether a CFO makes a good CEO depends on the type of CFO. There's the traditional CFO--the "bean counter"--whose job is to manage the money and keep a low profile so the rest of the company can do their thing. Then there are the new generations of CFO, which started coming up the ranks in the 1970s and 1980s (see, e.g., McDonnell-Douglas), who see creative accounting (aka financial engineering) as a legitimate way to boost stockholder value and an end in itself, independent of a company's core competency. If a company has good bones, a traditional CFO can make a great steward at the very least. For the new type of CFO, they often couldn't care less about a company's core competency, and are more speculator than bean counter, at least in the traditional meanings of those terms.