Boeings’s Downfall - “Greed is Good” the McDonnell Douglas Merger

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The downfall of Boeing is the downfall of the American industrial sector. Short term growth over all else, that end justifies all means, no matter how ruinous they are to anything or anyone else.

im not a christian but i hope there is a hell somewhere for that board of directors that forced hundreds of working class employees to give up their pensions and accept job cuts whilst they make millions. disgraceful and completely unjustifiable behaviour.

Letting Mullaly walk was the biggest single mistake Boeing ever made.

Jack Welch was a monster, destroying General Electric. I lived outside of the very city he rose in the ranks of GE, Pittsfield Massachusetts. There's nothing left of the huge operations that GE once had there. The company is small, now, having sold off its various divisions and people. Welch's philosophy is used by many companies and is one of the most destructive, anti-social ways to run a company - so much so, that when I look to change employers, if I see a company that has adopted his and HBS principles, I avoid working there. It is completely unsurprising that Welch's policies wrecked Boeing, leaving it with back-stabbing beancounter managers and dissatisfied workers. In order for the company to be fixed, they must throw out Stonecypher's remnants and going back to "Working Together".

Jack Welsh has destroyed more wealth than almost any individual who ever lived. He is responsible for many of the problems we see in Big Business today with the concentration on profits and shareholder value rather than just making great products. He destroyed GE, and tangentially he is destroying Boeing as well.

The idea of taking the business model of the failing company you just bought and make it yours just seems idiotic.

I worked at Boeing Commercial Airplanes from 1988-2013. I recall being in a meeting around the time of the merger where the speaker brought up the stock price. I had never heard anyone mention the wall street element of the business prior to that. Microsoft was going through the roof and the only reason I remember any of this was because Microsoft charts were put on view foils and blasted on a screen. Being the resident master of the obvious in the meeting I blurted out that Microsoft is selling 99.00 windows CD's that are probably a dime or so to make. We are building the 747. Didn't matter to whoever was speaking. It was also around that time that Boeing brought senior managers from Toyota to explain to us how to build an aircraft. It was embarrassing to watch management from a different industry convince my managers that I didn't know what the fuck I was doing. We had the wing leading edge underwing panels as a job package on the graveyard shift. It was very demanding work. You had to move fast to drill 400 close tolerance holes over your head. All different types of fasteners and hole sizes. Rivets, huck bolts, blind rivets, WQ, HLT all diameters from 3/16" to 1/2". Some with collars and many with 12 point nuts that required a first and a second torque. If you had a shallow countersink and had to beat those things back out you had to use a slide hammer to pull the heads if you could even get it to slip over the shank. Usually they had to be drilled out. The Japanese car builders saw us chucking up a drill bit and drilling every hole to pre coldwork dimensions from the number 1 strut to the number 2 strut. 060852 job, two guys and one shift to get that entire length drilled, holes sold at pre coldwork sizes. Sleeve coldworking if you could find the enerpac nose. Reamed after that and then another hole check. Then remove the panels to deburr everything, thaw out tubes of lead based sealant and get that shit everywhere. Put them back on and countersink into fiberglass which smokes cutters and causes a visit to the tool room to get another one if they aren't busy bullshitting. Set it to the correct depth, finish the rest. Start gripping the holes for the fastener lengths, go find all the right fasteners and get them in and torqued, get a QA to verify that, then after 20 minutes to allow for sealant to squeeze out, find another QA and have them witness the second torque. Put putty on every single but and then push your stamp into it to indicate that it was witnessed. Now go get rivet aprons and 15 different sized bucking bars, you really need the ones you had to grind the shit out of to get into a tight spot. Start blasting rivets over your head while the bucker is nearly hanging upside down to reach the tails. Shoot all 350 or so D rivets, microshave the heads, touch up the conductive coating. Install the blind bonding rivets, get a biddle meter to verify they are .002 ohms or less. The Toyota peeps were morons. Not just a little either. Major idiots. They wanted us to run a separate air hose for every tool we used. No more quick disconnects. Hard connections. We were gonna shave the time it took me to pop the air line off my drill and slap it onto my rivet gun. Not only that, we were going to be tripping on about a dozen air hoses that would be a tangled mess in 10 minutes. And!! They wanted me to work every process for one hole before I moved to the next one. It was obvious neither Boeing management, nor the consultants they thought could teach a workforce that they didn't understand to begin with. Understood what we actually did for a living. They hired people to follow me with a clipboard and a stop watch. I would lose the timekeeper in a matter of a minute or two. One said to me that the time in between countersinking one hole, moving myself to get underneath the next one wasn't value added and then said the drill was doing all the work anyway. I laid that fucking tool on the ground and said. Let me know when it's done. Walked away before I beat his ass. I could go on and on about stupid shit I had to deal with. That is a small sample. Like a couple hours of asinine bullshit. I wrote to Boeing after the Max crashes. I told them in simple English. Thanks for ruining my bragging rights! I loved working there and you fucked it all up. You just never listened. Now people are permanently DEAD. I am ashamed to say I ever worked for Boeing. Sent that off and now I am self employed as an eternal voice to shove their noses in shit for the devastation they rained down on so many innocent people. Trying to blame anyone they could point at. Boeing. 25 years of my life. They can never redeem themselves with me. Not a single real man in that C-Suite. Just a bunch of ivy league ass kissers. They still have no clue and they can't find men with spines to stand in for the milk toast that runs the place. They don't even care.

When I started my journalism career in 2001, my manager asked me to read more about Jack Welch in order to understand the American psyche and thinking. After reading about Jack Welch, I came to understand how bad corporate greed could be.

As a Boeing engineer through that period, I can confirm that Mulally was extremely popular and we wanted to see him in charge of the company. Great video 👍

btw with Mulally Ford was the only US automaker to not ask for bailouts from the government iirc, plus somehow surviving Detroit, man must be a beast

Ex Boeing employee here. Internally, we all knew the McDonnell-Douglas merger was going to be a disaster.

When the robot historians of 2084 are digging through the rubble, they will conclude that the MBA was the most destructive educational product ever conceived.

Simple, Boeing placed the dollar over the safety of their product. Now the chickens have come home to roost.

Jack Welch being a mentor to the upper management at MD explains absolutely everything.

Being feared as a boss should never be seen as a good thing. People will just start hiding problems and they will not be honest anymore

i lived it. when i went to boeing in 1977, my coworkers were apollo mission to the moon engineers. I was in awe. When I left in 2016, I threw my Boeing T shirt in the trash bin. So sad. It was brutal.

I've heard of 'stacked ranking' style management before, and still think it's a disgusting method of running a business...."OK, you made 100% of your goals and benchmarks for the quarter and everything is excellent. However This other guy did 105%, this guy did 110% and this third guy managed a whooping 120% of his goals! Since you didn't overachieve like them we're just gonna have to let you go ".... I mean there's more to it than that but every breakdown I've heard of it before boils down that way. Great recipe for a work environment full of backstabbing, retribution, and over promising or overlooking things just to make your numbers look better compared to other peoples.

Who knew that in 2024, we would still be finding out new things that Jack Welch’s greed ruined? Wild.

Having worked at a company which started a downward spiral soon after being acquired by Jack Welch’s GE, I can attest to the toxic effects his business style had. “Neutron Jack” and his acolytes accomplishments did much to ruin America’s businesses . Effects of which we are still suffering, as shown by your excellent video.