Since about 1990 there has been an increasing emphasis on short-term profit at the expense of long-term stability and growth. Work has been outsourced to companies that lack the capability to deliver satisfactory components or subsystems, but submit extremely low bids. Boeing staff then have to be assigned to clean up the mess so the hardware works and production gets back on schedule. However, upper management fails to learn from experience, and the whole process repeats the next time they look for a supplier, or do a Make-or-Buy decision. This can be very frustrating to observe.
Over a period longer than a year or two, a diagram of management assignments above the lower levels would look like a demonstration of Brownian motion in action. Managers spend more time working to obtain their next position than to do their assigned jobs. The general management philosophy seems to be to take some dramatic action that looks impressive and financially spectacular in the short term, and move on to another position elsewhere before it becomes obvious that the Emperor's new clothing is actually very drafty. Promising wonderful things while consciously ignoring reality appears to be the approved road to corporate advancement.
Managment guru Peter Drucker created a variety of phrases such as "Management by Objectives" to describe various approaches that management can use to effectively perform their functions. On many occasions, the best description of upper and middle management behavior at Boeing is probably a phrase that Drucker never used - "Management by Wishful Thinking".
There is a history within
