Why Boeing is Dismissing a Top Executive (barrons.com) 13
Last weekend Boeing announced that its CEO of Defense, Space, and Security "had left the company," according to Barrons. "Parting ways like this, for upper management, is the equivalent to firing," they write — though they add that setbacks on Starliner's first crewed test flight is "far too simple an explanation."
Starliner might, however, have been the straw that broke the camel's back. [New CEO Kelly] Ortberg took over in early August, so his first material interaction with the Boeing Defense and Space business was the spaceship's failed test flight... Starliner has cost Boeing $1.6 billion and counting. That's lot of money, but not all that much in the context of the Defense business, which generates sales of roughly $25 billion a year.... [T]he overall Defense business has performed poorly of late, burdened by fixed price contracts that have become unprofitable amid years of higher than expected inflation. Profitability in the defense business has been declining since 2020 and started losing money in 2022. From 2022 to 2024 losses should total about $6 billion cumulatively, including Wall Street's estimates for the second half of this year.
Still, it felt like something had to give. And the change shows investors something about new CEO Ortberg. "At this critical juncture, our priority is to restore the trust of our customers and meet the high standards they expect of us," read part of an internal email sent to Boeing employees announcing the change. "Why his predecessor — David Calhoun — didn't pull this trigger earlier this year is a mystery," wrote Gordon Haskett analyst Don Bilson in a Monday note. "Can't leave astronauts behind."
"Ortberg's logic appears sound," the article concludes. "In recent years, Boeing has disappointed its airline and defense customers, including NASA...
"After Starliner, defense profitability, and the strike, Ortberg has to tackle production quality, production rates, and Boeing's ailing balance sheet. Boeing has amassed almost $60 billion in debt since the second tragic 737 MAX crash in March 2019."
Thanks to Slashdot reader Press2ToContinue for sharing the news.
Still, it felt like something had to give. And the change shows investors something about new CEO Ortberg. "At this critical juncture, our priority is to restore the trust of our customers and meet the high standards they expect of us," read part of an internal email sent to Boeing employees announcing the change. "Why his predecessor — David Calhoun — didn't pull this trigger earlier this year is a mystery," wrote Gordon Haskett analyst Don Bilson in a Monday note. "Can't leave astronauts behind."
"Ortberg's logic appears sound," the article concludes. "In recent years, Boeing has disappointed its airline and defense customers, including NASA...
"After Starliner, defense profitability, and the strike, Ortberg has to tackle production quality, production rates, and Boeing's ailing balance sheet. Boeing has amassed almost $60 billion in debt since the second tragic 737 MAX crash in March 2019."
Thanks to Slashdot reader Press2ToContinue for sharing the news.
Boeing needs an lot to trun it around! (Score:2)
Boeing needs an lot to trun it around!
So let me get this straight... (Score:3)
So let me get this straight. This guy took over one year ago. Starliner had three launches prior to him starting, two of which were declared successes despite things going substantially wrong (parachute failure, thruster failure), the third of which was declared a failure because it couldn't dock with ISS, having entered the wrong orbit because of a computer programming/configuration error. And out of the 25 months since the last failure, he had been over the project for just 10 of those months.
One can only assume that Boeing's engineers assured him that they had worked the kinks out, and that Starliner was ready to launch. They obviously had not. And when things went wrong, he presumably did the right thing and decided to scrub the human landing and not take chances with astronaut safety.
So now, they're holding him accountable for the failure, even though the project had already been a train wreck for almost four years by the time he took over, thus firing the one person who is still new enough to actually have a prayer of responding to the latest failure and forcing some actual accountability, and we're supposed to believe that this is going to make things better for Boeing?
Yikes. At this rate, the jokes about Boeing being the sound it makes when it hits the ground are going to stop being jokes.
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Re:So let me get this straight... (Score:5, Informative)
So let me get this straight.
You don't have it straight. But it isn't your fault. TFS is extremely poorly written.
The new CEO, Kelly Ortberg, isn't being fired. He's the person doing the firing.
The person being fired, Ted Colbert, isn't even named in TFS.
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So let me get this straight.
You don't have it straight. But it isn't your fault. TFS is extremely poorly written.
The new CEO, Kelly Ortberg, isn't being fired. He's the person doing the firing.
The person being fired, Ted Colbert, isn't even named in TFS.
Oh. Oof. I didn't even notice that it was the same person's name down below, and assumed that the "new CEO" was actually... you know, new, not 13 months into the job.
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Seems like (Score:3)
This could have happened 20 years ago (Score:3)
and would still have been very late. The behaviour from the top, of crushing anyone for reporting company/subcontractor procedural issues was in full swing from the late 1990's.
They've got a lot of trust to restore - Both internally and externally.
They need a scapegoat (Score:2)