We are seeing in America where ideology and conformity now dominate in private corporations as well as in government agencies. Competence, hard work, ingenuity and thinking outside the box have been replaced by poor service, poor quality control, and dangerous planes being manufactured by Boeing Corporation. We need individuators as employees on all levels of an organization for it to make excellent, cost effective, safe products—safe airplanes—in this case.
Christopher Rufo offers an email subscription which I subscribe to and his article on Boeing is very instructive as to how a corporation goes woke and deteriorates when ideology, groupism and groupthink dominate a titan of American industry. No more Yankee ingenuity and individual initiative. The Left destroys all that it touches.
Rufo sent out, on 4/5/24, a email entitled “It’s an Empty Executive Suite-An insider explains what has gone disastrously wrong with Boeing’; I will spot quote Rufo and then comment on what he wrote.
Rufo: “Boeing is—or was—a great company. From its manufacturing plants in Seattle, it produced the world’s most reliable, efficient aircraft. But after merging with McDonnell Douglas, shifting production around the world, and moving its headquarters to Chicago, and then Arlington, Virginia, the Boeing Company has been adrift.
Then, in October, 2018, one of Boeing’s new 737 MAX aircraft crashed. Then, a few months later, another. Recent months have seen embarrassing maintenance failures, including a door plug that blew off an Alaska Airlines plane in mid-flight.
To explain what went wrong, I have been speaking with a Boeing insider who has direct knowledge of the company’s leadership decisions. He tells a story of elite dysfunction, financial abstraction, and a DEI bureaucracy that has poisoned the culture, creating a profound sense of alienation between the people who occupy the executive suite and those who build the airplanes.”
My response: I am an operating engineer at a private, religious college in the Twin Cities, and what Rufo reports about Boeing describe eerily to a T the woke fools running the campus into the ground. The workers at the bottom know the truth, but the boobs running the place are clueless. Workers have to become individuating supercitizens, and this will force clueless elites running the organization to embrace bitter reality, regardless of their fancy for their fantasies to be applauded up and down the chain of command.
Rufo: “ . . . “
Rufo (R after this as interviewer of knowledgeable Boeing insider): “I am hoping you can set the stage. In general terms, what is happening at Boeing?”
Insider (I after this): “At its core, we have a marginalization of the people who build stuff, the people who really work on these planes.
Following the second 737 MAX crash in 2019, then CEO-Dennis Muilenburg defended the company in front of Congress and the public, he defended the engineering, defended the work—and showed he was willing to protect and support the workforce, but it caused the board and the public fear, which bought in a sweeping set of changes that caused huge turnover in talent.
So, right now, we have an executive council running the company that is nearly all outsiders. The CEO is a General Electric guy, as is the CFO he brought in. And we had a completely new HR leader, with no background at Boeing. There are now no engineers as part of the core team. The head of our commercial business in Seattle who was recently fired was the only engineer in the executive council.
The headquarters in Arlington is empty. Nobody lives there. It is an empty executive suite. The CEO lives in New Hampshire. The CFO lives in Connecticut. The heads of HR and communications live in Orlando. We just instituted a policy that everyone has to come into work five days a week—except the executive council, which can use the private jets to travel to meetings. And that is the story: it is a company that is under caretakers. It is not under owners. And it is not under people who love airplanes.”
My response: Where is Ayn Rand when Boeing needs her to introduce a Hank Rearden from Rearden Metals, the new owner of Boeing, that love planes, and running the company is his living as well as his path to self-realization? Such high-functioning entrepreneurs will make America great again.
I: “In this business, the workforce knows if your love the thing you are building, or if it is just another set of assets. At some point, you cannot recover with process what you have lost with love. And I think that is probably the most real story of them all. There is no visible center of the company and people are wondering what they are connected to.”
My response: The workers will care if the owners or elites running the companies care; otherwise crap, dangerous products are manufactured and shoved out to the public—safety be damned.
R: “If they have lost the love of building airplanes, what is the love, if any, that they bring to the job?”
I: “Status games rule every boardroom in the country. The DEI narrative is a very real thing, and, at Boeing, DEI got tied to the status game. It is the thing you embrace if you want to get ahead. It became a means to power.
DEI is like the drop you put in a bucket and the whole bucket changes. It is anti-excellence, because it is ill-defined, became part of the culture, and became tied to compensation.”
My response: I read somewhere that some ancient Greek philosopher (Aristotle) defined clear, encompassing definitions as basic to developing clear thinking, well-shaped concepts that lead to knowledge and real-world applied success and excellence. DEI is ideological: it is ill-defined and anti-excellence, so now Boeing is headed down the tubes, rapidly deteriorating.
I: “Every HR email contains: ‘Inclusion makes us better.’ We all know they don’t mean including the guy who brings his Bible to work. And this kind of politicization of HR is a real problem in all companies.
If you look at the bumper stickers at the factories in Renton or Everett, it is a lot of conservative people who like building things—and conservative people do not like politics at work.
The radicalization of HR does not hurt tech businesses like it hurts manufacturing businesses. At Google, they are making a huge profit margin and pursuing very progressive hiring practices. And because they are paying 30 or 40 percent more in salary, they are able to get the top 5 percent of whatever racial group they want. They can afford, in a sense, to pay the DEI tax and still find top people.”
My response: Yes, Google and the tech companies can do ideology, group think, and politics at work for a while, but, eventually, they will tank like Boeing tanked, because they will breed out or fire any smart people that still innovate and provide excellence at work. Even the top 5% become dumb when not allow to be individuals or individuators at work.
I: “But this can be catastrophic in lower margin, or legacy, companies. You are playing musical chairs at the end of the dance. And if you try to do the same things that Google is doing, you are going to end up with the bottom 20 percent of the preferred population.”
R: “What else does the public not understand about what is happening at Boeing?”
I: “Boeing is just a symptom of a bigger problem: the failure of our elites.”
My response: we need owners, elites running companies, and the rank-and-file employees doing the companies work to all be individualists and individuators. Where this does not occur, all levels of the organization fail, period.
I: “The purpose of the company is now ‘broad stakeholder value,’ including DEI and ESG. This was then embraced as means to power, which further separated the workforce from the company—and it is ripping apart society.
Boeing is the most visible example, because every problem—a bolt that falls off—gets amplified. But this is happening everywhere around us, and it is going to have a huge effect. DEI and ESG became a way to stop talking honestly to employees.
We need to tear the veil off this coded language that is being used everywhere and we need to have our elites recover some sense of service to people. They think they have it, because they are embracing the shibboleths of moral virtue: ‘I am serving because I am repeating what everyone else is saying about DEI.’ It is a form of cheap love that is been embraced by leaders. If you pay the tax to the DEI gods or the ESG gods, and use coded language with your workforce, it solves you of the hard work of really leading.”
My response: Every institution, of all stripes, require the abandonment of groupism and group ethics—to be replacing by individualism, workplace individuators and egoist ethics. This institutional revolution would revitalize any institution, and, in plain English, people on all elvels of the institutional will lead the organization into the future.
I: “No. Service means you are spending the extra time to understand what is really happening in the factory and in your supply chain. There should be some honor, in understanding that we inherited something beautiful and good and worth loving.”
My response:
This insider interviewed by Chris Rufo is remarkably perceptive, not only about the inner workings of Boeing, but as to how what is happening at Boeing will tank businesses and corporations all across America.
Give Rufo credit that he points out that private corporations can be corrupt and inefficient, just like government corporations—and I add military, educational, ecclesiastical, mass media and entertainment institutions—when they are politicized with ideological rhetoric.
Note that Rufo allows the insider to get away with lambasting elites for their inability to provide service to people, their workers, clients, and stockholders. This is true but does not go far enough. No institution will thrive unless individuators are 80% of the workforce at every level of the organization, and Rufo sees the world only as improvable if the elites running the institutions are excellent by choice.
Who is John Galt?
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