Boeing’s bright spot this year was the hiring of its new CEO, an engineer and aerospace chief named Kelly Ortberg, after years of finance men at the helm. But Ortberg’s arrival is clouded by the controversies hanging over Boeing, from hours-long hearings on safety issues to a fraud charge to the first worker strike in 16 years.
Let’s not forget the stranded astronauts at the International Space Station.
Boeing’s troubles started long before two 737 MAX planes crashed in less than five months between 2018 and 2019, killing 346 people. Several experts point to the 1997 merger between McDonnell Douglas and Boeing as the trigger.
Their focus was on making numbers, not making planes.
Gautam Mukunda, leadership expert
What followed was a series of leadership decisions that prioritized profits and quarterly earnings over planes, according to Gautam Mukunda, a leadership expert, Harvard fellow and author of “Indispensable: When Leaders Really Matter.”
“It is a story about a larger pathology in the American corporate sector that just devastated the American economy and turned it from an economy that was focused on making things to an economy that was focused on playing games with spreadsheets,” Mukunda said. “And that story is why Boeing is the perfect example of everything that’s gone wrong.”
There is no alternative but to fix Boeing.
Gautam Mukunda, leadership expert
In the video above, Mukunda delivers a master class on Boeing’s history and leadership decisions that have steered this American company to its current crossroads.
Is Ortberg the right guy to fix Boeing’s problems? Should the company move its headquarters back to the Seattle area? What are Boeing workers saying in private about the culture at Boeing? What companies are most at risk of following Boeing’s path? Mukunda answers these questions and more in this Straight Arrow News interview. Watch the video above.
