F-16.net

disconnectedradical wrote:https://aviationweek.com/aerospace/aircraft-propulsion/opinion-will-boeing-become-next-mcdonnell-douglas?elq2=ea67b8013334473283f1df14355e8b04

Having worked at Boeing as an engineer, I must say I can agree with a lot of the statements here. Corporate and engineering culture really went down after the merger. I really wish we can go back to the day when Boeing was still an engineer-led organization.

A common saying is that when Boeing merged with McDonnell Douglas, the McDD bought Boeing and made Boeing pay for it since with the distribution of stocks, McDD still ended up being majority stakeholder.

sprstdlyscottsmn wrote:I saw the thread title and came to say what you guys already alluded to. Boeing can't "become" the next McDD because it already IS McDD and has been since the 90s.

sprstdlyscottsmn wrote:I saw the thread title and came to say what you guys already alluded to. Boeing can't "become" the next McDD because it already IS McDD and has been since the 90s.

Some say that even as the name disappeared, the McDonnell Douglas finance-first culture survived the 1997 merger, eclipsing Boeing’s engineering-first culture.

For about 80 years, Boeing basically functioned as an association of engineers. Its executives held patents, designed wings, spoke the language of engineering and safety as a mother tongue. Finance wasn’t a primary language. Even Boeing’s bean counters didn’t act the part. As late as the mid-’90s, the company’s chief financial officer had minimal contact with Wall Street and answered colleagues’ requests for basic financial data with a curt “Tell them not to worry.”

By the time I visited the company—for Fortune, in 2000—that had begun to change. In Condit’s office, overlooking Boeing Field, were 54 white roses to celebrate the day’s closing stock price. The shift had started three years earlier, with Boeing’s “reverse takeover” of McDonnell Douglas—so-called because it was McDonnell executives who perversely ended up in charge of the combined entity, and it was McDonnell’s culture that became ascendant. “McDonnell Douglas bought Boeing with Boeing’s money,” went the joke around Seattle. Condit was still in charge, yes, and told me to ignore the talk that somebody had “captured” him and was holding him “hostage” in his own office. But Stonecipher was cutting a Dick Cheney–like figure, blasting the company’s engineers as “arrogant” and spouting Harry Trumanisms (“I don’t give ’em hell; I just tell the truth and they think it’s hell”) when they shot back that he was the problem.

disconnectedradical wrote:We had a really good reputation before the merger.