In a clash of corporate cultures, where Boeing’s engineers and McDonnell Douglas’s bean-counters went head-to-head, the smaller company won out.
[…]
Since the start of the jet age, Boeing had been less a business and more, as writer Jerry Useem put it in Fortune in 2000, “an association of engineers devoted to building amazing flying machines.”
[…]
A formerly cosy atmosphere, in which engineers ran the show and executives aged out of the company gracefully, was suddenly cut-throat. In 1998, the year after the merger, Stonecipher warned employees they needed to “quit behaving like a family and become more like a team. If you don’t perform, you don’t stay on the team.”
[…]
Now, a passion for great planes was replaced with “a passion for affordability.”
Stonecipher seems to have agreed with this assessment. “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,” he told the Chicago Tribune in 2004. “It is a great engineering firm, but people invest in a company because they want to make money.”
Bref, un désastre inscrit dans la transformation d’une boîte passée des mains des ingénieurs à des obsédés de la #création_de_valeur (pour l’actionnaire).
