I watched a documentary that said Spirit came when the Boeing bean counters divided up the company to make a quick profit and be able to shift Blake to Spirit. They replaced vertical integration with circular blame.
The Boeing documentaries I've seen have all been great. It really shows the issues with the Jack Welch model of business that only cares about short term quarterly profits. My father used to complain that every new CEO at his company would first fire a bunch of people to make stock go up even knowing the long term implications would be disastrous. He used to say you could train a monkey to press a button and do that. In the case of Boeing, they used to have an engineering culture that prized innovation and safety. Now they don't even know how to make planes anymore from scratch. All they seem to be capable of is modifying existing designs that are now practically ancient. In my eyes it's like having to do a 5000 mile car race and using a bunch of NOS at the beginning. You get ahead of everyone and then blow out the engine and everyone ends up getting way ahead (ok, I don't know much about cars). It's just overly short term thinking.
> My father used to complain that every new CEO at his company would first fire a bunch of people to make stock go up
Yup. My last company had a disastrous CEO who used public layoffs as his only lever. It worked once, despite a total of four pulls. The engineering departments were gutted and nobody really knew how everything worked anymore.
Somehow the company is still alive, though with a share price now about 1/20th what it was and 1/60th its typical highs.
