In a Wall Street Journal article published earlier this week, journalists Sharon Terlep and Andrew Tangel outline how Boeing can begin to turn itself around following a series of damaging scandals.
Drawing on interviews with dozens of experts — including current and former Boeing leaders, airline executives, employees, suppliers, safety regulators, and others — the journalists explain that culture lies at the root of Boeing's problems. "Boeing's culture morphed over time from one that valued ingenuity and quality to one that prioritized shareholder returns," they write.
Fixing these cultural shortcomings will require Boeing to put safety first, acknowledge and learn from mistakes, and build a more collaborative environment across the corporation, the experts argued. "Until it soaks through every layer of the company, all the way down to the person who sweeps the factory floor, until everybody has that in their DNA—that the most important thing to Boeing is excellence and safety of flight—there will never be a full, 100% trusting of that company, because their mind is not on the ball," Morrie Goodman, a former communications leader at Boeing, NASA, FEMA and the Commerce Department, told the WSJ.
Rebuilding that trust among employees, regulators, and the public will be essential for Boeing going forward, Terlep and Tangel explain, and events of the last year have done little to begin that process. "We ultimately want companies that are doing the right thing when the oversight isn't looking, and Boeing has to become that kind of a company," said retired Army Lt. Gen. David Bassett.
Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg, who took the helm in August last year, will need to act fast to overcome these challenges, and evidence that to all relevant stakeholders. One of the primary means by which Boeing and its regulators are looking to do so is through a Department of Justice-imposed monitorship. However, even if this deal was not up in the air due to judicial concerns, it is not clear that monitors are at all qualified to resolve cultural shortcomings.
In an op-ed published in the Washington Post last month, Todd Haugh, Associate Professor of Business Law and Ethics at Indiana University, and Hui Chen, a former DOJ Prosecutor, explain why monitorships, as they exist today, are not fit for purpose for preventing misconduct or for reliably and measurably improving culture.
"The ultimate success of a monitorship must be judged on well-defined and scientifically measurable changes within the monitored organization," they write. "Social and behavioral science provides such tools, but few, if any, monitors even know about them. Most have only legal expertise, which might help them understand the law but won't remake corporate cultures in a meaningful way."
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