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Originally Posted by IROC
I worked for McDonnell Douglas/Boeing for almost 20 years. I’ve met Condit and Stonecipher - Stonecipher on a few occasions - he even hung out in my cubicle for a while once.
While I agree with premise that “shareholder value” drove the company in the wrong direction, I strongly disagree that this can be blamed on McDonnell Douglas. I worked in one of the only (maybe the only?) locations where both McDonnell Douglas and Boeing had offices, so I had a front row seat to the way each company did things. I can state from my experience it was not McDonnell Douglas that diluted the engineering focus of the company.
It is laughably ironic to see Boeing Commercial Aircraft employees blaming McDonnell Douglas for their downfall after Boeing basically eliminated all evidence of MD commercial aircraft right after the “merger”. At the time, Boeing even refused to call it a merger. McDonnell Douglas was called a “Wholly-Owned Subsidiary of the Boeing Company” up until they did away with the name altogether.
I was proud to work for McDonnell Douglas. Boeing - not so much. I was a second-class citizen and left in early 2008.
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100% true. I was working in Long Beach at the time of the merger, it was very sad to see the commercial line go away.
I traveled to Renton not long after the merger. I will never forget a Boeing manager talking about a Blue Angels show he had recently seen. It torqued me when he said how proud he was to see the Boeing F-18s performing. It still bugs me, actually.