Are Boeing’s engineering woes due to financialization?

For about 80 years, Boeing basically functioned as an association of engineers. Its executives held patents, designed wings, spoke the language of engineering and safety as a mother tongue. Finance wasn’t a primary language…

 

By the time I visited the company—for Fortune, in 2000—that had begun to change. In Condit’s office, overlooking Boeing Field, were 54 white roses to celebrate the day’s closing stock price. The shift had started three years earlier, with Boeing’s “reverse takeover” of McDonnell Douglas—so-called because it was McDonnell executives who perversely ended up in charge of the combined entity, and it was McDonnell’s culture that became ascendant.

 

… One of the most successful engineering cultures of all time was quickly giving way to the McDonnell mind-set.

That was from an interesting article in The Atlantic, “The Long-Forgotten Flight That Sent Boeing Off Course: A company once driven by engineers became driven by finance.” HT: Chris M.

I can’t believe Boeing’s Chief Financial Officer, a former McDonnell guy, said this:

“When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it’s run like a business rather than a great engineering firm.”