Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg has been on the job since August, or roughly three and half months, and he addressed Boeing employees on November 20, providing his frank assessment of the issues confronting the aerospace giant. The CEO specifically called out:

1. Bloated management ranks
2. Wasteful spending
3. A culture of infighting and shirking responsibility

Conversations with several Boeing employees following the address relayed to me that the message was well and positively received by many of the company’s employees. They know and recognize the issues, but aren’t in a position to enact change unless led, which is what Ortberg appears to be doing with deliberate energy.

The first two issues addressed by Ortberg are relatively easy to define, measure, analyze, improve, and control (yes, “DMAIC” is alive and well), but the third item is a bit harder to define and measure, but ultimately is the feature of Boeing’s corporate culture that is the root cause of many of the seemingly existential crises the company has found itself in over the past decade. 

How to fix it? In my mind, there are two big changes that Boeing needs to make:

1. First, the company needs to weed out executives who are not willing to take genuine ownership of their decisions. I’m not sure that this needs further explanation, but you can’t understate the effectiveness of a leader who will take responsibility for everything their team does or fails to do. Notice I said “responsibility” and not credit. Boeing needs leaders who give their team credit for strong outcomes and who take responsibility when their teams come up short.
2. Second, the company needs to stop managing by committee. In my experience, working with Boeing, a huge portion of decisions at organizations like this are made through an iterative process with a formal or ad-hoc group of executives. Most of these decisions should be made at the Manager or Senior Manager level, but the corporate culture can often be so ossified that even basic decisions get “kicked upstairs” to a group of executives who take an inordinate amount of time to arrive at a decision that may be low risk yet suboptimal and expensive. Empower people to make decisions, reward leadership, and don’t make a failure a career killer. 

This turnaround is all about leadership, and I expect you should expect a lot of changes at Boeing over the next couple of years.

Ortberg, who took over in August, offered a blunt assessment of the troubled aircraft maker’s situation in an hour-long, companywide meeting on Wednesday. He called out bloated management ranks, wasteful spending and a culture of infighting and shirking responsibility.

https://www.wsj.com/business/airlines/boeing-ceo-to-employees-we-cant-afford-another-mistake-5cad7634?mod=airlines_news_article_pos2