Hello and
welcome back to The Educated Leadership Blog! This week we are going to look at
stories about the organization in which I work and the impact they have on the
culture and values therein.
I work in an organization that is the reports up to
another organization that reports to another organization that reports to the
ultimate corporate level. The overarching corporation is The Boeing Company.
Finding stories that are illustrative of the goals, ideal, and culture of the company
is a task of relative ease. A search of the web will return dozens of books
about the history and challenges of Boeing. There are a few stories, in
particular, that resonate with me as they pertain to the culture of a company
that is turning 100 years old this summer.
Of my favorites, there are three that point to the
spirit of Boeing that I know. Those would be the story of Tex Johnston doing
barrel rolls over the SeaFair festival in the B707 prototype, the story of the
design and development of the B747 led by Joe Sutter, and the story of the
design and development of the B777 led by Alan Mullaly.
Let’s focus on the story of the B747. If you haven’t had
the chance to read “747: Creating the World’s First Jumbo Jet and other
Adventures from a Life in Aviation” by Joe Sutter and Jay Spenser (2006), here’s a condensed
version. Back in the 1960’s, the commercial aviation battle between Europe and
the United States was focused on the development of a supersonic transport.
Europe was busy developing the Concorde and the United States had entrants from
a number of manufacturers, including Boeing, who were vying for a government
contract. There was a tremendous amount of prestige around building such a
sophisticated piece of machinery, especially for the time. Remember, computers
were not commonplace. As the competition wore on, the costs continued to mount
for all the entrants. Boeing committed a vast majority of its aeronautical
engineers to the task. However, one engineer, Joe Sutter, was asked to stay
focused on building an airliner that Pan Am was interested in buying. Pan Am
had bought the B707 and flew them all over the world. The airline’s president,
Juan Trippe, loved having his jets viewed as icons of world travel. He was now
looking for the next best big thing.
Juan was convinced he wanted a double-decked B707 and
had asked Boeing to investigate building it. Joe Sutter was the lead engineer
and was faced with trying to satisfy a very demanding customer with limited
engineering resources. Undaunted, Joe took on the challenge. He provided vision
and leadership for his team and they united behind him. It wasn’t too long
before Sutter’s team realized a double decker was not going to work. However,
they did figure out that if the floor plan of the B707 were doubled in width,
they could design a plane around it. Trippe remained adamant about the double
decker. In a pivotal moment, Sutter sent an engineer to New York to visit Mr.
Trippe at his office on Park Avenue. Luckily, the meeting room where the two
were to meet was over 24 feet wide. Why was that lucky? Because the engineer
had a 21-foot strip of material to roll
out to show Mr. Trippe how wide his new jet would be.
Trippe agreed to go ahead with the deal. The next
challenge was that there wasn’t a factory big enough to build a jet of the size
Sutter’s team had drawn up! The answer Boeing and Sutter came up with was to build
the factory as the built the first airplane! Coincidentally, the supersonic
transport program was shut down by the US government and all of the engineering
assets it had tied up became available to Sutter. So many unforeseen issues and
challenges were encountered and conquered by Sutter and his team that they
earned the nickname, “The Incredibles”.
The ingenuity, resilience, and resourcefulness of the
people who got the B747 onto and off the drawing board and then into the air
are looked to as pillars of Boeing’s existence. The story is almost mythical in
its importance to the history of our
company. Every employee who has seen a B747 or been lucky enough to visit the
Everett factory gets a sense of pride when they hear the story. I still have a
physical reaction, in the form of getting the chills, when I see a documentary about the struggle
Boeing went through to produce what had been inconceivable to anyone up to that
point in history.
I have been very lucky to have had the opportunity to
fly the B747 and to teach pilots from our customer airlines how to fly it, too.
I feel a sense of responsibility to all those who built those planes and to the
reputation of the overall company. I have that expectation of my colleagues
because of the commitment and efforts put
forth by the employees who preceded us.
The story of the B747, the B777, the B29, and the B707 are all records of
defining moments at a company this is known
for producing products that few believed could
dream of, let alone make. We have tied the characteristics that these teams
exemplified into our leadership attributes and we strive to be as innovative as
those before us have been.
Stories are powerful tools for leaders. Stories that
help define culture and values can be referenced time and again. Look for
stories in your organization, family, or group that can aid you in describing the
values you want to prosper. As we continue through the weeks of our course on
communications, we will learn how to bring other tools to bear and how to be
more effective leaders.
See you next week!
Joe Sutter, J. S. (2006). 747: Creating the World's First Jumbo Jet
and Other Adventures from a Life in Aviation. New York, NY: HarperCollins.
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