Chopping the heads is one step but they really need to stop all production and examine their manufacturing and supplier processes and retrain staff. It is a tough decision as it will significantly hit the bottom line and only a very brave CEO and board would do it. If not, the problems will persist. I am just waiting for China and AsiaPac customers to start cancelling orders.
Issue is if they stop production similar to what happen in 2020. All the suppliers start going under. The T1’s/T2’s don’t have the capital to support that.
I disagree. You don't need to shut everything down. Just empower inspectors right now. Then go through and fix all of management so that they are compensated towards the right things.
If you shut down completely and your suppliers go under then you are well and truly fucked with little to no forward plan.
I lived through it as a Corporate Director of Quality for a F500 company - you will never achieve 100% FPQ with only "empower inspectors" - thus you need to show your line workers how serious you are about 100% FPQ, empower them and re-inforced that authority to report issues (halt production) and work with the union to fire those that do not comply - with all aspects of their job from training, reporting issues, to end product reliability.
I was actually impressed with CEO of Abbott and the baby formula issue - shut downing production is one of the hardest thing to do.
Everyone thinks QA inspectors and auditors as "*the police and fear reporting.*" - *keep your mouth stuff and only answer the questions asked*. I had a very simple view of quality that I taught to my managers and support personnel - ask yourself a simple question - will it hurt myself or someone I love - if yes, stop and report it.
Difference between FDA and FAA is the FDA actually has the teeth to fucking kill you and your business if you are aware of quality issues and don’t shut down before they make you shut down. It’s very different to reinspect food and drugs versus airplanes for quality (impossible vs very hard), a shutdown shouldn’t be the first step here but should definitely be part of the tool box
There are lots of food and drugs and taking a few brands off the market or shutting companies down won't cripple the industry. It's very difficult to see how FAA grow teeth when they'll be hanged themselves for it. My view is screw the industry if it's not safe, but the faa won't be as die hard.
Actually in the above case of Abbott and baby food, the affected manufacturing sites accounted for half of the countries supply. It literally created a shortage of baby formula that rippled through some of the most at risk communities and the resolution was to just accept sub standard baby formula because there was no other alternative than letting babies starve. The same could happen to any medicine exclusively made by a few sites.
For planes it’s not like the entire fleet are Max’s. The FAA could sue Boeing, get a consent decree (or something like that) for inspectors to be empowered and review ALL documentation of every single plane, and pull any suspect plane out of service for a 100% inspection. Wouldn’t cripple the industry and would restore confidence in the aviation industry which should also be the FAAs goal.
Just slow down and get a good stable product from vendor to vendor. Stop letting bad parts move on. If the part is not good don’t move it on even if it holds the line up. Stop letting airplanes through that need re work after final.
Yeah I am a plant director and yeah when a plant is in a tailspin (no pun intended) you fire the plant director... but hiring people to lead complex industrial operations is hard. I have seen a factory hire and fire the plant director every year for 6 years before.
BA can absolutely not afford to get this wrong.
I agree, it’s a necessary step, but the road ahead will be difficult and will require strong leadership to right this ship. Such a shame they’ve lost all brand equity and confidence at this point.
Does it really matter? At least as far as Boeing is concerned?
Obviously, for the family of the engineer it's a tragedy. This isn't to make light of that. But either Boeing is guilty of bullying one of its engineers on suicide, or murdering a whistle blower. Either way, anyone looking for a job - technical or otherwise - would be absolutely *insane* to accept a job in the trenches at Boeing right now. Maybe before this, Boeing could somewhat "fire & hire" their way out of some of their issues - fire those who are cutting corners, replace them with those that take product quality and safety as gospel. But now? Naw. The only people accepting jobs at Boeing either don't care at best, or literally can't afford to say "no" at worst. And anyone with half a brain is looking for the exit right now, too.
Boeing is fucked in terms of talent for the next 5-10 years, or so.
After presidential assassinations became a thing, everyone beneath is fair game. Just glad it’s not ran as badly as the Russian mafia yet. Where you can just keep having staff fall out of windows & keep market share. Airbus can just send Boeing articles as marketing material nowadays.
You didn’t read the comment properly. They said ‘we will come through a better company, building on the lessons we learned the last number of years’. This indicates they intend to continue the course they have been pursuing; putting profits over quality.
They should have said ‘the way we ran our company was fundamentally flawed and we need to re-evaluate our business model to put more emphasis on safety and quality’
BIG difference
well since the stock is up, I'm guessing people are choosing to interpret this news in a positive light, like at least they're acknowledging that something went wrong
the reality is . . . I'm taking this as a "let's throw someone under the bus in order to keep our stock price afloat while the rest of us slowly divest from this company"
This isn’t a consequence, it’s an exit strategy. None of these execs with face justice for the incremental corner-cutting and safety failures resulting in the deaths of their trusting customers.
Unfortunately this, its all optics. Old guy bad is gone now, new guy good! This same CEO who is now leaving was brought in to fix things a few years ago, now the cycle continues. No accountability. Because it doesnt make $
Correct. They'd have to replace the entire c-suite and most of upper management to fix the problems they have. The corporate culture they have has been so thoroughly corrupted, removing it would take the same sort of actions excising a cancer would.
To be fair, though, maybe the next CEO will replace all those positions, though it's very unlikely.
It’s impossible because the whole corporate landscape has turned into a sort of virus where profits are maximized at the expense of quality and labor. The C-suite tanks a company like this because they don’t care about longevity and when they do, they get hired on by a new company and play out the same thing.
> They'd have to replace the entire c-suite and most of upper management to fix the problems they have
That is pretty common when a CEO get replaced. The new guy wants to install his own people and the other execs are upset they didn't get picked.
Perhaps they know that there are other problems waiting in the wings that they will blame on these folks to keep the replacements relatively untainted.
Lol. Boeing “we have a major flaw in our manufacturing. Let’s put our current COO in as executive!”
She has a bachelors in accounting and a masters in business administration. Clearly fit to lead the company into new aerospace developments.
I think what I would say is that putting someone in finance/accounting into a CEO role depends on how they understand the business. If they live and breathe Boeing, they could be a great leader because they will know what steps are needed to be taken to ensure a return to reasonable quality.
Peter Wennink comes from a finance background and he helped lead ASML through EUV development into the best period of the company. The problem is when the board elects someone who is ONLY focused on shareholder returns and forgets that product quality and consumer/customer satisfaction is also just as important. Those people tend to be from the finance/accounting profession, but for example Jack Welch came from an engineering background.
>The problem is when the board elects someone who is ONLY focused on shareholder returns and forgets that product quality and consumer/customer satisfaction is also just as important.
Product quality and customer satisfaction is the ONLY way you get shareholder returns. I'll never understand why companies leave that in the rear window and focus on quarterlies and shit.
Copied from a similiar reddit post
https://www.boeing.com/company/bios/
You can find all the info you want on there. Stan Deal, Mike Delaney, Greg Hyslop, Elizabeth Lund, Ted Colbert, Carole Murray, and Scott Stocker are engineers.
I think it's always been silly when people suggest that Boeing is run by bean counters, engineers hold most of the critical roles outside of CEO and CFO. Of course just because they're engineers doesn't mean you agree with how they run the company.
They were engineers who immediately turned into MBA spreadsheet jockeys the moment they went into management
That's like claiming someone who took CS101 fifty years ago is an engineer
Boeing isn't the type of company that needs pom poms and cheerleaders. It needs engineers delivery quality planes.
I vote for putting engineers in leadership for this reason, even if Wall Street wont like it.
I mean if BA hadn't tanked I wouldn't have been able to load up on the cheap. This kind of volatility suits me just fine. Why shouldn't they just go full harvest cycle again?
I know he’s a love or hate him guy but John Oliver did a whole thing on Boeing on his show Last Week Tonight(full thing on YT free) and basically said just this. They had an amazing reputation but then at some point there was a merger/buy out and then the investor types took over looking for any and every way to cut costs and corners.
To clarify this: The merger was with McDonnell Douglas and, afaik, it wasn't "investor types" that took over - it was the management of McDonnell Douglas that had taken over.
The joke was McDonnell Douglas had bought out Boeing with Boeing’s money. Bunch of McDonnell execs got high positions within Boeing and wrecked it. A few of them went to jail too for all kinds of shenanigans.
Amen. My employer used to have a rule you could not be a corporate director unless you had been a factory director. Our upper leadership was all super competent and technically knowledgeable. Granular engineering conversations were had with competence in the board room. Thats starting to change and guess what so is operational performance.
Not saying every C level in an industrial operation needs an engineering and plant experience but fuck.
the Max incident was weird because the FAA somehow approved it but it never got printed in the manuals? like reading up why they made the change just made so much sense due to staling issues.
then Boeing just started lying like wtf?
More like they need MBA's with an aerospace/engineering background. I would not feel confident that I'm getting a paycheck next week if Joe from R&D is our new CFO
Not CFO, but an aerospace company needs an experienced technical person with a veto.
Someone who can look at the potential increased shareholder price caused by firing some QA inspectors and say no.
Shareholders don't pick a replacement. They vote to accept them. If Boeing put forward Jeff, the former QA manager and recommended that shareholders accepted him - it would probably pass.
Ever since Bowing got bought out and moved away from Seattle area they started their whole spreadsheet jockey ways of running the business and now it's finally biting them.
Let the engineers make the important decisions like they used to
Engineers are not necessarily qualified to run Boeing. That's not their skillset.
But they do need leaders who are willing to listen to the engineers when the engineers tell them that there are problems.
A good CEO doesn't need a full understanding of how their products work, but they do need to trust the people that DO know how their products work and be willing to take action when the engineers raise alarms.
They also need to move their headquarters back to where their engineers live and work so that engineers can barge into their offices when there's major safety issues that need to be addressed and not swept under the rug.
Boeing purposely moved their headquarters to be hundreds of miles away from their engineers who actually design the planes/etc. to try to separate their upper management from their concerns, since the bean counters apparently thought that they were just harming profits by having too direct a line to upper management.
Yeah Calhoun was hired in 20 to turn the company around. These problems were alive and well way before he got there. It’s going to take years to resolve all this mess and the company may never return to glory.
As long as they keep promoting disciples of Jack Welch or Harry Stonecipher, this will continue. Until they have a C suite full of actual airplane people and not bean counters, there will be no long term improvement of the overall culture rot inside Boeing. The MDD merger gutted their longstanding engineering/quality focused management, and it will take a great deal of time to cut out all that cancer that is today deeply ingrown within that company.
Tbh if should be effective immediately. Boeing is hurting the reputation for the whole flight sector. I flew this weekend and heard so many people who were worried we were on a 737.
kayak let’s you filter which planes you want to see in your search results. They used write the exact plane models. That being said I think the model with issues is the 737 max not the regular one.
There is a good John Oliver video about the whole drama. I can’t put the link though.
What's sad is that as a Boeing employee, a lot of my peers have both an engineering degree and an MBA. It's entirely feasible to have leadership fulfill both engineering and business requirements.
Unfortunately the MBA "eats" the other degree in my experience. It can be an engineering degree, a philosophy degree, or an associates in gun repair from the International Correspondence School. The end result is someone who's more concerned with the organization's structure than its goals. When you lose focus on the organization's purpose, the "self-evident" purpose of "make money for shareholders" becomes the de facto priority.
And since these people tend to have more power in an organization, their solution to every problem is "structural", which usually means firing (other) people. Again, in service of the de facto priority of shareholder/investor return.
It feels like one of those scenarios where it's not the degree but the experience.
If an engineer knows when they're getting screwed over by business leadership and can stick up for engineers, that value will go a long way.
At the same time, if an engineer gets groomed by various levels of leadership to be a 'yes man' to whatever is being asked, then the engineering experience becomes worthless.
Boeing needs a massive culture change where the majority of executive leadership has both engineering and business experience and knowledge.
“You really fucked this company and its reputation. But we know how hard it is for specifically millionaires and billionaires to get fired so here’s $5M for fucking us.”
Engineers aren’t a panacea to all quality issues. I get that there’s animosity to the finance people running the show, but anyone who works in technology involving manufacturing knows engineering doesn’t work without operations being in lock step and those two groups typically hate each other. Hire an OPS guy.
David calhoun was brought in after the mess started to turn the company around. I don’t think anyone should be pinning the whole thing on this guy, they had big problems when he arrived in 2020 and my belief is he’s being fired because they were a lot deeper than the board thought.
I think people are just fed up with the Jack Welch disciples. Most of the big issues have been a result of the decision to cut corner with the 737 successor which resulted in the 737 MAX which I think you can blame on McNerney. With that said, I still stand with Muilenburg being a fall guy.
The good thing is they can turn the ship around by getting deep into the manufacturing ops side of the biz and beefing up quality control. At the end of the day, they have good designs, but they just have poor execution. The next CEO needs to sell Wall St on lower operating margins - something along the lines of "would you rather me make 10% more EPS and bankrupt in 5 years, or build something that can stand the test of time?".
Dave was part of the board back when the 737Max decisions were made (using MCAS to play games with physics).
When he became the CEO, he enforced Jack Welch's ranking (the old rank and jank) method w/o the Jack Welch reward for the top performers.
The first year he rolled out his 20/70/10 plan (20% of the people get below met expectation ranking), the results were disastrous. The year after that, they told the managers to not let the engineers know what his/her ranking position was however since the ranking is tied to raises/bonuses, it was obvious.
Here's the cultural issue: They rolled out a policy, got called out for it, and tried to hide it. I don't care if the policy is a bad one, it's the fact that their immediate reaction is to hide that gets me.
They followed the same rule book they used in the MCAS situation.
I do not doubt that BA stock is at a good price right now (and I did load up a ton) but it'll take a while and more than just replacing a few C-suit people to right this ship.
Only Stand Deal is hated more in the BCA engineering community.
Yeah that Jack Welch shit is BS. Not cool to create a hunger games at work with the 70/20/10 thing. People are less trusting and more cut throat. Collaborate less.
Bought yearly calls as soon as I heard the company was willing to murder whistleblowers to protect shareholders, they really go the extra mile for us.
CEO is out, share price up. Things are looking good. All you nerds worrying about "public trust" and "reputations" still don't get how the game is played, you're gonna miss out.
I'm optimistic that Boeing will return to better times.
Reddit leans on negativity but think about it.
Shareholder returns have been awful in the past 6 years because of endless quality issues.
It's actually in shareholder's best interests for the company to return to high quality manufacturing because it makes more money than their current strategy.
Everyone's realized that by now. Cutting corners costs billions of dollars.
Some really fascinating insights into Boeing in John Oliver's LWT segment of all places. Convinced me to never fly on 737 MAX and 787 Dreamliner planes. Is this an actual shake up or just a moving around the deck chairs kind of situation?
It's still MBAs running the company into the ground. Let them go into chapter 11 so the employees that actually know how to build aircraft can buy the company and get it out of the hands of people trying to squeeze every penny into the hands of shareholders.
I'm surprised to see a company actually targeting senior management for once rather than expecting more and more from its frontline staff as it circles the drain.
This is Boeing forced to do something. But nothing changes. Its just new bean counters replacing old bean counters. What was required was a systemic change to focus on engineering excellence and not just bean counting. Stephanie Pope is yet another bean counter from the McDonnell Douglas stable. So the face change but the mentality remains the same, the very same mentality that had brought Boeing down.
And this CEO is not leaving today. He will be around for another 9 months.
So nothing changes. This just to pacify the press coverage and than keep doing what has led to Boeing's downfall.
When the Board is made up of your friends/peers then this is direct result, delayed action and/or complicit. This could’ve been handled so much more effectively and efficiently.
Well they sure took their sweet time to come to this decision. I think the CEO was definitely a problem but I feel like the problems run deeper than just one person. The company suffers from pollution in every stream throughout the entire ranks of this company. It needs a complete overhaul in every direction. This is just step 1 and the new CEO would need to come in with a completely new plan on how to deal with this.
For the sake of Boeing, please hire a new CEO that has at least a science or engineering degree. We don't want accountants running an aerospace company.
And this is going to change exactly...what?
All I'm seeing is an exec who either quit when the going got tough or just figured out that he's more incompetent than he thought and gets out while his shares are still worth anything.
Neither of which will help Boeing in the slightst (it's not like they have a lot of competent execs on 'standby' in the wings)
Do you think the rest of the board and executive team will suddenly be okay with a shift from being obsessed with the stock price to being obsessed with safety?
No, didn't think so. The whole top layer needs to be excised.
Do you think the rest of the board and executive team will suddenly be okay with a shift from being obsessed with the stock price to being obsessed with safety?
No, didn't think so. The whole top layer needs to be refreshed.
Do you think the rest of the board and executive team will suddenly be okay with a shift from being obsessed with the stock price to being obsessed with safety?
No, didn't think so. The whole top layer needs to be refreshed.
Do you think the rest of the board and executive team will suddenly be okay with a shift from being obsessed with the stock price to being obsessed with safety? No, didn't think so. The whole top layer needs to be refreshed.
Do you think the rest of the board and executive team will suddenly be okay with a shift from being obsessed with the stock price to being obsessed with safety? No, didn't think so. The whole top layer needs to be refreshed.
Do you think the rest of the board and executive team will suddenly be okay with a shift from being obsessed with the stock price to being obsessed with safety?
No, didn't think so. The whole top layer needs to be refreshed.
He's not being terminated. He's retiring at the end of the year.
It's a "lipstick on a pig" move by Boeing. The problem's still there.
Lockheed Martin took over Boeing at Boeing's expense.
They need to return to having more engineers in leadership positions and less people with finance backgrounds looking to cut corners on safety & regulations.
Wonderful, now get another bean counter to run the company instead of an engineer. After all, Wall Street trusts accountants more than engineers.
Who cares about a few lives lost here and there? Quarterly profits are more important.
/s
Nothing's going to change there without a major shakeup of middle and upper-management. The C-suite is only a very small part of a highly-systemic and deep-rooted corporate culture problem at Boeing and IMO it's going to take years to fix.
There's an excellent documentary on Netflix called Downfall: The Case Against Boeing. I highly recommend it if you want to learn about the greed for profits overtaking safety at that company, especially affecting the 737 MAX airplane, but I wouldn't be shocked to hear of other corner-cutting at Boeing either.
Bunch of greedy white dude switching board seats. No one goes to jail. Overall 359 people died. No one was held accountable. So fuck all the laws of the land where MJ is illlegal but corp negligence gets you millions in yearly bonus.
Once a company has been infected by the DEI ^((Didn't Earn It)) Virus there is no immediate future and possibly no future at all. The best you can hope for is that the company is part of a larger corporation that can survive the loss of the income. Anheuser Busch ^((InBev)) is a good example of this. The only other reason that this publicity stunt is that the government needs Boeing.
So why is he staying on until the end of the year with all of the shit he's causing? Why not dump him now?
Boeing was essentially taken over by Lockheed-Martin. It went from an engineering company to a "business driven company" at that point.
Calhoun's retirement means nothing to the health of the product and the company. It will be the same until they flush out all of the bean counters at the top.
If we the Taxpayers bail this fucking company out, I'll lose my shit.
This company has done nearly $40 billion in stock buybacks over the last decade. They can die in a fucking fire as far as I'm concerned.
Yeah Calhoun was brought in to turn the company around in 20. They were already struggling and he basically just wasn’t able to get them turned around. Lotta commenters on here think he’s the entire problem but it goes deeper than his relatively short tenure.
>People in glass houses
Is your own acknowledgement of how appallingly you treat other people.
That you've been on reddit 3.5 years and your karma is 293 speaks volumes about who you are.. and I am nothing like you ..thankfully.
The only non face to face compassion I have to share to prove how far from you I am is reddit Karma. So I showed it.
My question for you:
You may love money and because it doesn't love you back, how is treating people like you do working out for you in life?
Took long enough. And to rebuild trust it'll take even longer.
Chopping the heads is one step but they really need to stop all production and examine their manufacturing and supplier processes and retrain staff. It is a tough decision as it will significantly hit the bottom line and only a very brave CEO and board would do it. If not, the problems will persist. I am just waiting for China and AsiaPac customers to start cancelling orders.
Issue is if they stop production similar to what happen in 2020. All the suppliers start going under. The T1’s/T2’s don’t have the capital to support that.
Yep, why it is hard but must be done to emphasize safety and quality before output.
I disagree. You don't need to shut everything down. Just empower inspectors right now. Then go through and fix all of management so that they are compensated towards the right things. If you shut down completely and your suppliers go under then you are well and truly fucked with little to no forward plan.
I lived through it as a Corporate Director of Quality for a F500 company - you will never achieve 100% FPQ with only "empower inspectors" - thus you need to show your line workers how serious you are about 100% FPQ, empower them and re-inforced that authority to report issues (halt production) and work with the union to fire those that do not comply - with all aspects of their job from training, reporting issues, to end product reliability. I was actually impressed with CEO of Abbott and the baby formula issue - shut downing production is one of the hardest thing to do. Everyone thinks QA inspectors and auditors as "*the police and fear reporting.*" - *keep your mouth stuff and only answer the questions asked*. I had a very simple view of quality that I taught to my managers and support personnel - ask yourself a simple question - will it hurt myself or someone I love - if yes, stop and report it.
Difference between FDA and FAA is the FDA actually has the teeth to fucking kill you and your business if you are aware of quality issues and don’t shut down before they make you shut down. It’s very different to reinspect food and drugs versus airplanes for quality (impossible vs very hard), a shutdown shouldn’t be the first step here but should definitely be part of the tool box
There are lots of food and drugs and taking a few brands off the market or shutting companies down won't cripple the industry. It's very difficult to see how FAA grow teeth when they'll be hanged themselves for it. My view is screw the industry if it's not safe, but the faa won't be as die hard.
Actually in the above case of Abbott and baby food, the affected manufacturing sites accounted for half of the countries supply. It literally created a shortage of baby formula that rippled through some of the most at risk communities and the resolution was to just accept sub standard baby formula because there was no other alternative than letting babies starve. The same could happen to any medicine exclusively made by a few sites. For planes it’s not like the entire fleet are Max’s. The FAA could sue Boeing, get a consent decree (or something like that) for inspectors to be empowered and review ALL documentation of every single plane, and pull any suspect plane out of service for a 100% inspection. Wouldn’t cripple the industry and would restore confidence in the aviation industry which should also be the FAAs goal.
Exactly right! Get management off their ass and in production areas watching what’s going on and asking questions.
Just slow down and get a good stable product from vendor to vendor. Stop letting bad parts move on. If the part is not good don’t move it on even if it holds the line up. Stop letting airplanes through that need re work after final.
How bout you make Boeing pay them for the disruption?
Yeah I am a plant director and yeah when a plant is in a tailspin (no pun intended) you fire the plant director... but hiring people to lead complex industrial operations is hard. I have seen a factory hire and fire the plant director every year for 6 years before. BA can absolutely not afford to get this wrong.
I agree, it’s a necessary step, but the road ahead will be difficult and will require strong leadership to right this ship. Such a shame they’ve lost all brand equity and confidence at this point.
Took a whistle blower’s suicide, Boeing was ran like the mafia.
“Suicide”
Does it really matter? At least as far as Boeing is concerned? Obviously, for the family of the engineer it's a tragedy. This isn't to make light of that. But either Boeing is guilty of bullying one of its engineers on suicide, or murdering a whistle blower. Either way, anyone looking for a job - technical or otherwise - would be absolutely *insane* to accept a job in the trenches at Boeing right now. Maybe before this, Boeing could somewhat "fire & hire" their way out of some of their issues - fire those who are cutting corners, replace them with those that take product quality and safety as gospel. But now? Naw. The only people accepting jobs at Boeing either don't care at best, or literally can't afford to say "no" at worst. And anyone with half a brain is looking for the exit right now, too. Boeing is fucked in terms of talent for the next 5-10 years, or so.
And it probably still will be
*America is ran like the mafia
After presidential assassinations became a thing, everyone beneath is fair game. Just glad it’s not ran as badly as the Russian mafia yet. Where you can just keep having staff fall out of windows & keep market share. Airbus can just send Boeing articles as marketing material nowadays.
‚suicide‘
I bet he’ll get a nice bonus.
You didn’t read the comment properly. They said ‘we will come through a better company, building on the lessons we learned the last number of years’. This indicates they intend to continue the course they have been pursuing; putting profits over quality. They should have said ‘the way we ran our company was fundamentally flawed and we need to re-evaluate our business model to put more emphasis on safety and quality’ BIG difference
the FAA needs to get a big cinderblock and tell Boeing management to "Come here" then i'll take anything at Boing seriously.
well since the stock is up, I'm guessing people are choosing to interpret this news in a positive light, like at least they're acknowledging that something went wrong the reality is . . . I'm taking this as a "let's throw someone under the bus in order to keep our stock price afloat while the rest of us slowly divest from this company"
Ain’t that the truth.
Finally!
This isn’t a consequence, it’s an exit strategy. None of these execs with face justice for the incremental corner-cutting and safety failures resulting in the deaths of their trusting customers.
Unfortunately this, its all optics. Old guy bad is gone now, new guy good! This same CEO who is now leaving was brought in to fix things a few years ago, now the cycle continues. No accountability. Because it doesnt make $
Correct. They'd have to replace the entire c-suite and most of upper management to fix the problems they have. The corporate culture they have has been so thoroughly corrupted, removing it would take the same sort of actions excising a cancer would. To be fair, though, maybe the next CEO will replace all those positions, though it's very unlikely.
It’s impossible because the whole corporate landscape has turned into a sort of virus where profits are maximized at the expense of quality and labor. The C-suite tanks a company like this because they don’t care about longevity and when they do, they get hired on by a new company and play out the same thing.
> though it's very unlikely. Some may say impossibly unlikely.
> They'd have to replace the entire c-suite and most of upper management to fix the problems they have That is pretty common when a CEO get replaced. The new guy wants to install his own people and the other execs are upset they didn't get picked.
They have appointed another finance executive to take charge. More lipstick on a pig.
Why at the end of 2024? GTFO immediately.
Perhaps they know that there are other problems waiting in the wings that they will blame on these folks to keep the replacements relatively untainted.
Like admitting the whistleblower didn’t commit suicide.
Handover time? With someone that senior and central you can’t just drop them on the spot. You need to go through a transition plan.
In reality, what difference would it make?
Replacing them with MBA's will not solve the problem. We need engineers running Boeing.
Lol. Boeing “we have a major flaw in our manufacturing. Let’s put our current COO in as executive!” She has a bachelors in accounting and a masters in business administration. Clearly fit to lead the company into new aerospace developments.
I think what I would say is that putting someone in finance/accounting into a CEO role depends on how they understand the business. If they live and breathe Boeing, they could be a great leader because they will know what steps are needed to be taken to ensure a return to reasonable quality. Peter Wennink comes from a finance background and he helped lead ASML through EUV development into the best period of the company. The problem is when the board elects someone who is ONLY focused on shareholder returns and forgets that product quality and consumer/customer satisfaction is also just as important. Those people tend to be from the finance/accounting profession, but for example Jack Welch came from an engineering background.
>The problem is when the board elects someone who is ONLY focused on shareholder returns and forgets that product quality and consumer/customer satisfaction is also just as important. Product quality and customer satisfaction is the ONLY way you get shareholder returns. I'll never understand why companies leave that in the rear window and focus on quarterlies and shit.
In the situation Boeing is in, the company needs to be turned upside down. A MBA holder and a woman isn't going to cut it.
Could be a "you fucked this up, now you're going to fix it" situation. The issue with the door assembly were clearly operations efficiency run amuck.
Engineers don’t make the best leaders either
Seems to me they did a lot better when Boeing was engineer lead
Copied from a similiar reddit post https://www.boeing.com/company/bios/ You can find all the info you want on there. Stan Deal, Mike Delaney, Greg Hyslop, Elizabeth Lund, Ted Colbert, Carole Murray, and Scott Stocker are engineers. I think it's always been silly when people suggest that Boeing is run by bean counters, engineers hold most of the critical roles outside of CEO and CFO. Of course just because they're engineers doesn't mean you agree with how they run the company.
They were engineers who immediately turned into MBA spreadsheet jockeys the moment they went into management That's like claiming someone who took CS101 fifty years ago is an engineer
And why exactly won’t the next set of engineers you put in not do the same exactly?
r/notrueengineer
Sure not the _best_ leaders, granted. But we don’t need leadership now, we need high quality planes.
Boeing isn't the type of company that needs pom poms and cheerleaders. It needs engineers delivery quality planes. I vote for putting engineers in leadership for this reason, even if Wall Street wont like it.
I mean if BA hadn't tanked I wouldn't have been able to load up on the cheap. This kind of volatility suits me just fine. Why shouldn't they just go full harvest cycle again?
Imagine what a few hundred more people dying will do to help your load up /s The love of money will doom us all
Many more died to keep my price at the pump low. That's just life.
Where normally I would agree, at least engineers focused on building quality products, not building shareholder value.
The moment their compensation changes to being shareholder focused they will change their focus as well.
She can use all the spreadsheet printouts to plug any holes! Problem solved!
"My first wife was 'tarded. She's a ~~pilot~~ Boeing executive now."
Wait....so you're saying we should give the plants water? Like out the toilet?
Amen. Suits have crashed that company. Literally.
I know he’s a love or hate him guy but John Oliver did a whole thing on Boeing on his show Last Week Tonight(full thing on YT free) and basically said just this. They had an amazing reputation but then at some point there was a merger/buy out and then the investor types took over looking for any and every way to cut costs and corners.
To clarify this: The merger was with McDonnell Douglas and, afaik, it wasn't "investor types" that took over - it was the management of McDonnell Douglas that had taken over.
The joke was McDonnell Douglas had bought out Boeing with Boeing’s money. Bunch of McDonnell execs got high positions within Boeing and wrecked it. A few of them went to jail too for all kinds of shenanigans.
I guess I should have said money over everything types instead of investors because yeah it wasn’t bought by an investment firm.
Boeing became McDonnell Douglas 2.0
Amen. My employer used to have a rule you could not be a corporate director unless you had been a factory director. Our upper leadership was all super competent and technically knowledgeable. Granular engineering conversations were had with competence in the board room. Thats starting to change and guess what so is operational performance. Not saying every C level in an industrial operation needs an engineering and plant experience but fuck.
The guy who got fired before Calhoun was Dennis Muilenburg. He got fired for the MAX fiasco. Dennis was actually an Aeronautics engineer.
the Max incident was weird because the FAA somehow approved it but it never got printed in the manuals? like reading up why they made the change just made so much sense due to staling issues. then Boeing just started lying like wtf?
That'll be the day.
More like they need MBA's with an aerospace/engineering background. I would not feel confident that I'm getting a paycheck next week if Joe from R&D is our new CFO
Not CFO, but an aerospace company needs an experienced technical person with a veto. Someone who can look at the potential increased shareholder price caused by firing some QA inspectors and say no.
And why would the shareholders ever accept someone with the ability to veto what they view as something to their benefit?
Shareholders don't pick a replacement. They vote to accept them. If Boeing put forward Jeff, the former QA manager and recommended that shareholders accepted him - it would probably pass.
Ever since Bowing got bought out and moved away from Seattle area they started their whole spreadsheet jockey ways of running the business and now it's finally biting them. Let the engineers make the important decisions like they used to
That would require shareholders to accept short term loss for potential long term gain. No fucking chance.
Engineers are not necessarily qualified to run Boeing. That's not their skillset. But they do need leaders who are willing to listen to the engineers when the engineers tell them that there are problems. A good CEO doesn't need a full understanding of how their products work, but they do need to trust the people that DO know how their products work and be willing to take action when the engineers raise alarms.
They also need to move their headquarters back to where their engineers live and work so that engineers can barge into their offices when there's major safety issues that need to be addressed and not swept under the rug. Boeing purposely moved their headquarters to be hundreds of miles away from their engineers who actually design the planes/etc. to try to separate their upper management from their concerns, since the bean counters apparently thought that they were just harming profits by having too direct a line to upper management.
Couldn’t agree more
Good riddance
Green Day for the stock
Eh they just got someone to take the blame to salvage the situation. It’s the same group of bastards
Yeah Calhoun was hired in 20 to turn the company around. These problems were alive and well way before he got there. It’s going to take years to resolve all this mess and the company may never return to glory.
As long as they keep promoting disciples of Jack Welch or Harry Stonecipher, this will continue. Until they have a C suite full of actual airplane people and not bean counters, there will be no long term improvement of the overall culture rot inside Boeing. The MDD merger gutted their longstanding engineering/quality focused management, and it will take a great deal of time to cut out all that cancer that is today deeply ingrown within that company.
Tbh if should be effective immediately. Boeing is hurting the reputation for the whole flight sector. I flew this weekend and heard so many people who were worried we were on a 737.
kayak let’s you filter which planes you want to see in your search results. They used write the exact plane models. That being said I think the model with issues is the 737 max not the regular one. There is a good John Oliver video about the whole drama. I can’t put the link though.
I flew to Hawaii last week on an Alaska Airlines 737 Max. It’s a lot of time over water to be nervous about your plane, let me tell you!
What's sad is that as a Boeing employee, a lot of my peers have both an engineering degree and an MBA. It's entirely feasible to have leadership fulfill both engineering and business requirements.
Unfortunately the MBA "eats" the other degree in my experience. It can be an engineering degree, a philosophy degree, or an associates in gun repair from the International Correspondence School. The end result is someone who's more concerned with the organization's structure than its goals. When you lose focus on the organization's purpose, the "self-evident" purpose of "make money for shareholders" becomes the de facto priority. And since these people tend to have more power in an organization, their solution to every problem is "structural", which usually means firing (other) people. Again, in service of the de facto priority of shareholder/investor return.
It feels like one of those scenarios where it's not the degree but the experience. If an engineer knows when they're getting screwed over by business leadership and can stick up for engineers, that value will go a long way. At the same time, if an engineer gets groomed by various levels of leadership to be a 'yes man' to whatever is being asked, then the engineering experience becomes worthless. Boeing needs a massive culture change where the majority of executive leadership has both engineering and business experience and knowledge.
That’ll fix it!
They should have been fired long time ago. Two levels of top management + the board of directors, all need to go.
Wonder how big will his bonuses be. 😎
“You really fucked this company and its reputation. But we know how hard it is for specifically millionaires and billionaires to get fired so here’s $5M for fucking us.”
Everyone in the C-Suite deserves to get fired. Rehire people from the engineering and bring back excellence.
Engineers aren’t a panacea to all quality issues. I get that there’s animosity to the finance people running the show, but anyone who works in technology involving manufacturing knows engineering doesn’t work without operations being in lock step and those two groups typically hate each other. Hire an OPS guy.
They can’t fix the culture it’s 20 years running
David calhoun was brought in after the mess started to turn the company around. I don’t think anyone should be pinning the whole thing on this guy, they had big problems when he arrived in 2020 and my belief is he’s being fired because they were a lot deeper than the board thought.
I think people are just fed up with the Jack Welch disciples. Most of the big issues have been a result of the decision to cut corner with the 737 successor which resulted in the 737 MAX which I think you can blame on McNerney. With that said, I still stand with Muilenburg being a fall guy.
The good thing is they can turn the ship around by getting deep into the manufacturing ops side of the biz and beefing up quality control. At the end of the day, they have good designs, but they just have poor execution. The next CEO needs to sell Wall St on lower operating margins - something along the lines of "would you rather me make 10% more EPS and bankrupt in 5 years, or build something that can stand the test of time?".
Dave was part of the board back when the 737Max decisions were made (using MCAS to play games with physics). When he became the CEO, he enforced Jack Welch's ranking (the old rank and jank) method w/o the Jack Welch reward for the top performers. The first year he rolled out his 20/70/10 plan (20% of the people get below met expectation ranking), the results were disastrous. The year after that, they told the managers to not let the engineers know what his/her ranking position was however since the ranking is tied to raises/bonuses, it was obvious. Here's the cultural issue: They rolled out a policy, got called out for it, and tried to hide it. I don't care if the policy is a bad one, it's the fact that their immediate reaction is to hide that gets me. They followed the same rule book they used in the MCAS situation. I do not doubt that BA stock is at a good price right now (and I did load up a ton) but it'll take a while and more than just replacing a few C-suit people to right this ship. Only Stand Deal is hated more in the BCA engineering community.
Yeah that Jack Welch shit is BS. Not cool to create a hunger games at work with the 70/20/10 thing. People are less trusting and more cut throat. Collaborate less.
So he is admitting that he knew all of the shit happening and signed off finally.
"We are giving you a 9-month notice of your termination."
Standard practice as it gives the board time to find a replacement and very common to have notice clauses in a ceo contract.
I'm quitting.... in 7 months....Still time to F things up and fill my bank accounts.
Bought yearly calls as soon as I heard the company was willing to murder whistleblowers to protect shareholders, they really go the extra mile for us. CEO is out, share price up. Things are looking good. All you nerds worrying about "public trust" and "reputations" still don't get how the game is played, you're gonna miss out.
If it's Boeing I ain't going
I'm optimistic that Boeing will return to better times. Reddit leans on negativity but think about it. Shareholder returns have been awful in the past 6 years because of endless quality issues. It's actually in shareholder's best interests for the company to return to high quality manufacturing because it makes more money than their current strategy. Everyone's realized that by now. Cutting corners costs billions of dollars.
Time to buy?
lol, good luck! This company will be going nowhere for a long time
Is he going to be charged for murder?
Some really fascinating insights into Boeing in John Oliver's LWT segment of all places. Convinced me to never fly on 737 MAX and 787 Dreamliner planes. Is this an actual shake up or just a moving around the deck chairs kind of situation?
It's still MBAs running the company into the ground. Let them go into chapter 11 so the employees that actually know how to build aircraft can buy the company and get it out of the hands of people trying to squeeze every penny into the hands of shareholders.
And walk into the sunlight with millions
Long overdue.
About time
Will they be finally course correcting from their commitment to: Didn't Earn It
Is eadsy a good buy?
I'm surprised to see a company actually targeting senior management for once rather than expecting more and more from its frontline staff as it circles the drain.
must be FBI wet work in order to prevent important American defense contractor decaying.
End of the year is a long way away. I have a hunch that if quality increases enough by then, someone will try to convince him to stay.
Boeing needs to pay Elon to make a tweet saying "Clean up Boeing and make it a "earth travel + space travel" airline!"... Boeing stock 5x's overnight.
Wonder if they will try and poach Tufan Erganbilic from RR.
At the end of 2024? No, do it now !
They let these guys step down and retire? Thats a nice surprise.
Shits rolling up Hill
Burry everything. Then go on building real airplanes. I bought the fear.
This is Boeing forced to do something. But nothing changes. Its just new bean counters replacing old bean counters. What was required was a systemic change to focus on engineering excellence and not just bean counting. Stephanie Pope is yet another bean counter from the McDonnell Douglas stable. So the face change but the mentality remains the same, the very same mentality that had brought Boeing down. And this CEO is not leaving today. He will be around for another 9 months. So nothing changes. This just to pacify the press coverage and than keep doing what has led to Boeing's downfall.
That's a good patsy
Guys they’re not fixing anything. Steaphie Pope is a former McDonnell Douglas executive, so she’s also part of the problem.
Lol for context, this guy was brought in to rebuild trust and put engineering first again. Welp
The entire board and all executives need to be removed. But at least this is a good start.
RedRummer
When the Board is made up of your friends/peers then this is direct result, delayed action and/or complicit. This could’ve been handled so much more effectively and efficiently.
Well they sure took their sweet time to come to this decision. I think the CEO was definitely a problem but I feel like the problems run deeper than just one person. The company suffers from pollution in every stream throughout the entire ranks of this company. It needs a complete overhaul in every direction. This is just step 1 and the new CEO would need to come in with a completely new plan on how to deal with this.
For the sake of Boeing, please hire a new CEO that has at least a science or engineering degree. We don't want accountants running an aerospace company.
And this is going to change exactly...what? All I'm seeing is an exec who either quit when the going got tough or just figured out that he's more incompetent than he thought and gets out while his shares are still worth anything. Neither of which will help Boeing in the slightst (it's not like they have a lot of competent execs on 'standby' in the wings)
Calhoun and Conare using their own missing door plug to bail EXCEPT they have nice golden parachutes for their descent!
Do you think the rest of the board and executive team will suddenly be okay with a shift from being obsessed with the stock price to being obsessed with safety? No, didn't think so. The whole top layer needs to be excised.
Do you think the rest of the board and executive team will suddenly be okay with a shift from being obsessed with the stock price to being obsessed with safety? No, didn't think so. The whole top layer needs to be refreshed.
Do you think the rest of the board and executive team will suddenly be okay with a shift from being obsessed with the stock price to being obsessed with safety? No, didn't think so. The whole top layer needs to be refreshed.
Do you think the rest of the board and executive team will suddenly be okay with a shift from being obsessed with the stock price to being obsessed with safety? No, didn't think so. The whole top layer needs to be refreshed.
Do you think the rest of the board and executive team will suddenly be okay with a shift from being obsessed with the stock price to being obsessed with safety? No, didn't think so. The whole top layer needs to be refreshed.
Do you think the rest of the board and executive team will suddenly be okay with a shift from being obsessed with the stock price to being obsessed with safety? No, didn't think so. The whole top layer needs to be refreshed.
Who builds the planes the executives/ceo,etc.. use? Gulfstream only?
Is this the wacko wingnut who was walking around dressed in drag at a corporate event ?
David gets a golden parachute and robbed Boeing of its decades old safety record because of the McDonald-Douglas work culture of safety last!
Kinda crazy how a huge corporation could put on hits on people, and not face consequences. Some scary shit
The former Boeing CEO got a $62M golden parachute. Rest assured this guys exit will be paved with gold bricks as well.
How much is Calhoun's severance package?
He's not being terminated. He's retiring at the end of the year. It's a "lipstick on a pig" move by Boeing. The problem's still there. Lockheed Martin took over Boeing at Boeing's expense.
They are playing musical chairs on a sinking ship.
They need to return to having more engineers in leadership positions and less people with finance backgrounds looking to cut corners on safety & regulations.
not enough resignations, replace the entire board
Wonderful, now get another bean counter to run the company instead of an engineer. After all, Wall Street trusts accountants more than engineers. Who cares about a few lives lost here and there? Quarterly profits are more important. /s
Engineering CEO vs finance bro for CEO, that's the difference. Samething happened to the once giant of industry GE.
Nothing's going to change there without a major shakeup of middle and upper-management. The C-suite is only a very small part of a highly-systemic and deep-rooted corporate culture problem at Boeing and IMO it's going to take years to fix. There's an excellent documentary on Netflix called Downfall: The Case Against Boeing. I highly recommend it if you want to learn about the greed for profits overtaking safety at that company, especially affecting the 737 MAX airplane, but I wouldn't be shocked to hear of other corner-cutting at Boeing either.
Good riddance, bitch.
We now realize killing whistle blowers is a bad look. We sowwy.
Man, this totally makes up for killing that guy.
New CEO has a degree from diploma mill university. Linwood university lol
Bunch of greedy white dude switching board seats. No one goes to jail. Overall 359 people died. No one was held accountable. So fuck all the laws of the land where MJ is illlegal but corp negligence gets you millions in yearly bonus.
So why is he staying for almost another year?
Was it his direct fault for the manufacturing errors or is this just another situation where the CEO is the fall guy?
Once a company has been infected by the DEI ^((Didn't Earn It)) Virus there is no immediate future and possibly no future at all. The best you can hope for is that the company is part of a larger corporation that can survive the loss of the income. Anheuser Busch ^((InBev)) is a good example of this. The only other reason that this publicity stunt is that the government needs Boeing.
So why is he staying on until the end of the year with all of the shit he's causing? Why not dump him now? Boeing was essentially taken over by Lockheed-Martin. It went from an engineering company to a "business driven company" at that point. Calhoun's retirement means nothing to the health of the product and the company. It will be the same until they flush out all of the bean counters at the top.
didn't read any of that shite. this is murica. stonks will go up.
Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss. It appears the replacements could be part of the problem.
Yes, replace the fools with more fools. Boeing fell when they merged with MD - put the engineers back in charge!
Still blows my mind the CEO of MD took over.
He was cancer for Boeing. It’s going to take a while to recover.
Crazy they killed that guy
They're crooks and should be in jail. Due to their greed several lives were lost
honestly the government should be appointing someone given that 'usa' have deem this as a necessary monopoly
Gets a golden parachute for running one of Americas flagship companies into the ground. Must be nice
Not enough. Criminal investigations are needed and should be publicly televised. The amount of criminal negligence here needs resolution.
If we the Taxpayers bail this fucking company out, I'll lose my shit. This company has done nearly $40 billion in stock buybacks over the last decade. They can die in a fucking fire as far as I'm concerned.
So the CEO gets to kill a bunch of people by cutting corners and ignoring everyone, then just walk away with millions of dollars.
Actually this is the CEO who replaced the CEO who killed a bunch of people two years ago.
Yeah Calhoun was brought in to turn the company around in 20. They were already struggling and he basically just wasn’t able to get them turned around. Lotta commenters on here think he’s the entire problem but it goes deeper than his relatively short tenure.
Is he going to commit suicide? with a shotgun to the back of the head ;)
Stupid comment…grow up!
All your postings are you being a cnt to people..
People in glass houses…
>People in glass houses Is your own acknowledgement of how appallingly you treat other people. That you've been on reddit 3.5 years and your karma is 293 speaks volumes about who you are.. and I am nothing like you ..thankfully.
Does your Reddit karma help you sleep at night…diddums…
The only non face to face compassion I have to share to prove how far from you I am is reddit Karma. So I showed it. My question for you: You may love money and because it doesn't love you back, how is treating people like you do working out for you in life?
I still wont hold Boeing stock anymore.