Air India and Leadership: Values Practiced & Value Accrued & Destroyed
‘If it ain’t Boeing…’
Decades ago that maxim continued as follows, ‘…I ain’t going.’
Today? Well, maxims, like airplanes, require maintenance.
For two decades, Boeing leadership consciously unraveled, undercut, and undermined a much acclaimed and heralded tradition of engineering excellence and product quality. It pursued immediate financial objectives by cutting costs and swapping out competences such as deep engineering knowledge for outsourced suppliers. Thereby, Boeing succeeded in recreating itself and stuffing many a pocket. As former CEO Stonecipher said, “When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so it’s run like a business rather than a great engineering firm.”
The total cost of this shift in values accumulated over time-- fatal crashes, distressed employees, the inability to produce a totally new aircraft (not since 2004), and becoming a punchline on SNL. Ultimately, the cost also came to include massive amounts of money, tens and tens of billions of dollars, along with government mandated reform.
And, then there’s this… An anonymous quote from a Boeing employee captures yet another dimension of the cost, a cost for which finding a spreadsheet cell would prove challenging, at the very least: “I still haven’t been forgiven by God for the covering up I did last year. Can’t do it one more time. Pearly gates will be closed.”
Air India crash? The preliminary report highlights out of place fuel switches. The question becomes ‘why were they out of place?’ The answer will take months if not years for investigators to uncover. The likelihood that this Boeing Dreamliner, a reliable commercial aviation workhorse of longstanding, had a mechanical or software switch problem stemming from Boeing directly seems small.
Still, commentators on the preliminary can expect, at least occasionally, the question, ‘Would you fly Boeing?’
A nearly unimaginable question at the turn of the century. A question made possible by Boeing itself.
Gad Allon and my review of this case concludes with various implications, including the following three, implications I’d suggest for organizations of all kinds, for profit and not for profit, business and government, big and small:
You are what you eat…this slide began with the purposeful and strategic ‘merger’ with McDonnell Douglas.
Culture can intentionally break… and more easily than often portrayed.
Yes, as another maxim goes, culture can eat strategy for breakfast…but strategy well implemented can eat culture for lunch. Boeing provides a perverse example of just how to do so.
If you’d like to explore this topic further, especially of how Boeing effectively produced deep cultural change, then here’s a link to the article that I wrote with my friend/colleague Gad Allon (Senior Wharton Professor) Shea, G. and Allon, G. “Boeing: Wait, There’s More.” Strategy and Leadership, 2/28/25...complete with 2.5 pages of references.
…. And here’s a podcast that aired this morning on Wharton's This Week in Business…
Rebuilding Boeing: Engineering, Ethics, and Organizational Change