Boeing: a culture and a slogan can kill a business

In companies, internal slogans are rarely meaningless and often mean much more than words. They are displayed on walls, repeated in seminars, and included in annual reports as evidence of a truly vibrant culture. However, slogans can sometimes say much more than intentions, revealing a shift in model, a change in values, or even a drift that can ultimately prove very costly. At Boeing, the transition from one slogan to another accompanied and perhaps even caused one of the greatest industrial crises in modern history.

I generally use business cases to illustrate a point on a given topic, but they are almost never the subject of the article itself; they are only used as supporting material. But there are stories about companies or leaders that stand on their own and deserve to be told outside of any thematic reflection, and there is a good chance that this story about Boeing, which I have wanted to tell for a long time, will be the first in a new article format. Only time will tell.

In short:

• The cultural change at Boeing following the merger with McDonnell Douglas saw a profit- and hierarchy-oriented culture replace one focused on engineering and innovation, profoundly influencing the company’s strategic decisions.
• The slogan “Working Together,” symbolizing a collaborative approach that led to the success of the Boeing 777, was replaced by “More with Less,” which introduced a logic of cost reduction and short-termism.
• The development of the 737 MAX illustrates the excesses of this new culture, which prioritized immediate profitability at the expense of safety, transparency, and innovation, leading to two fatal crashes and a major crisis.
• This managerial shift weakened the collective intelligence of the business by reducing internal freedom of expression, coordination between experts, and the reporting of safety issues.
• Despite a desire for optimization, this strategy has not been profitable in the long term: the 737 MAX has generated massive losses, while the 777, which was more expensive to design, has proven to be much more financially successful.

Two irreconcilable cultures

Those who know me well are aware of my passion for the world of aeronautics, and although I will avoid boring you with my knowledge on the subject, it is impossible to understand what happened without some background information on these two companies and the sector.

When Boeing merged with McDonnell Douglas in 1997, the deal was presented as a marriage between equals. In reality, it was Boeing that bought McDonnell, but over the years, it was the McDonnell culture that prevailed. This culture was forged in the military industry and structured around compliance with specifications, cost reduction, and a rigid chain of command, where innovation was tightly controlled, risk was assumed by the government, and margins were guaranteed by government contracts.

Although both businesses manufactured military and commercial aircraft, Boeing was more of a civil aviation specialist, while McDonnell Douglas leaned more toward the military. The company, born from the merger between McDonnell and Douglas, which was a military player, found it increasingly difficult over time to innovate in the field of civil aircraft and gradually concentrated on the military sector, where the risk is lower with government orders and development costs borne by the customer, contenting itself with improving existing models without venturing into new programs for its civil range. This detail would prove to be very important later on.

Conversely, commercial aviation is based on a completely different logic. It requires upstream investment, with no guarantees, in the hope of subsequently selling to airlines that will judge the aircraft on its performance, operational efficiency, safety, and ease of maintenance. In the civil sector, you don’t respond to a fixed set of specifications, but you anticipate uses, innovate, and take financial, technological, and often reputational risks.

Above all, at Boeing, there was a powerful, almost artisanal engineering culture that was the pride of the business. Technical decisions were guided by a single compass: “what’s the best plane we can build?”. It was a culture of excellence, long-term thinking and rigor. The company wasn’t there to maximize margins, but to push the limits of what engineering could achieve.

Hence the famous phrase that has been circulating ever since:

“It wasn’t Boeing that bought McDonnell Douglas, it was McDonnell Douglas that bought Boeing with Boeing’s money.”

In other words, although Boeing absorbed McDonnell Douglas on paper, it was the McDonnell Douglas culture, hierarchical, military-financial, and focused on short-term profits that took over. This change was at the root of the crises that Boeing would experience twenty years later.

The golden age of the 777 and “Working Together”

Before this setback, Boeing had enjoyed what many consider to be its industrial golden age: the 777 program. Launched in the 1990s, the 777 was Boeing’s first long-haul fly-by-wire aircraft (a flight control system in which the pilot’s commands are no longer transmitted mechanically or hydraulically to the flight controls but converted into electronic signals that are then processed by flight computers), nearly 10 years behind Airbus, and was above all the result of a collaborative approach.

The 777 inaugurated a participatory development method called Working Together. This is not just a slogan, but an integrated design philosophy: engineers, production teams, pilots, maintenance technicians and representatives of customer airlines work together from the earliest stages of the project. United Airlines, as the launch customer, played a key role in defining requirements, but beyond this initial partnership, the entire organization reinvented itself around a culture of dialogue, iteration and shared responsibility.

The result is clear: an exemplary program in technical, commercial and human terms. A reliable aircraft with unmatched capabilities and efficiency, acclaimed by airlines and profitable for the manufacturer to such an extent that it earned the nickname “Money Maker” because it was very profitable for Boeing, but above all for its airline customers. Working Together was proof that a culture focused on use, co-construction, and technical excellence could produce lasting innovation…and profitability.

The shift to “More with Less” or blind optimization

But after the merger, the dynamic changed and so did the slogan. Boeing moved from “Working Together” to “More with Less”, and this formula, seemingly full of economic common sense, gradually undermined the very foundations of the business.

“More with Less” was initially a cost-cutting program that became a management philosophy and then an implicit norm. Everything had to be done faster, cheaper, with fewer staff, fewer tests, fewer certifications, and less consultation with stakeholders. It also marked the end of large-scale projects: no new aircraft were designed, and existing models were optimized by pushing the limits of the 737, 767, and DC-9 (which became the Boeing 717). In short, they made new things out of old things because it was cheaper than innovating and launching a completely new program.

And to legitimize this cultural shift, nothing beats a catchy phrase from the new management:

“When people say I changed the culture at Boeing, that was exactly the goal: to run it like a business, not a big engineering firm” said Harry Stonecipher, former CEO of Boeing after serving as CEO of…McDonnell Douglas.

Words have meaning, and ultimately they have a transformative impact: Boeing no longer asks, “What is the best airplane we can build?” but “What is the best airplane we can afford to build?“.

This shift is essential to the story we are interested in. It is no longer a question of striving for progress, but of managing constraints, not of making do with what you have, as advocated by the logic of effectuation, but of giving up on fully exploiting what you have: talent, expertise, know-how, memory, and collective intelligence. Engineering becomes an adjustment variable, the product becomes secondary, and finance takes precedence.

The 737 MAX, a product of “More with Less”

The 737 MAX is undoubtedly the most tragic example of the limits of this cultural change. Not only was this program an industrial failure, but it also embodies how a slogan can become a guideline, then a prism for decision-making, to the point of steering every decision toward the short term.

At the end of the 2000s, faced with the success of the A320neo launched by Airbus, Boeing had to react. But instead of starting from scratch, as it had done with the 777 in the 1990s, management made a different choice: to extend the 737 platform, which had been launched in 1967, by adapting an old aircraft to a new one. The stated objective was to accelerate time-to-market, reassure airline customers about maintenance and training costs, and limit development investments. This was the “More with Less” logic applied to the letter.

But this initial choice had a knock-on effect. The new aircraft was longer and heavier, with larger engines positioned higher up, which altered its flight characteristics. To correct this without requiring costly pilot training, Boeing developed software called MCAS, the existence of which was downplayed in the manuals. This poorly documented system, which was even hidden to avoid imposing new certifications on pilots, caused two major crashes (Lion Air in 2018 and Ethiopian Airlines in 2019), killing 346 people and grounding the entire fleet worldwide for nearly two years.

To help you understand, it’s a bit like buying a Renault 4 in 2025 (it was launched at the same time as the 737). Of course, it will have a modern engine and modern electronics, but it will still be a Renault 4 whose limits have been pushed to the point where its very structure can no longer cope with the demands placed on it.

The choice was not technological, it was cultural and was the answer to “What is the best aircraft we can afford to build?” The shift from engineering ambition to immediate profitability not only cost billions of dollars (between $20 billion and $25 billion, depending on the source), it also permanently damaged confidence in the Boeing brand.

The MAX was not designed to fly better, but to cost less, get to market faster, and retain customers in the face of competition. It sums up what happens when a business abandons its DNA and adopts a shareholder-focused, short-term culture.

Let’s be clear: I’ve heard many people say that Boeing no longer knows how to make airplanes, which is of course not true! Boeing’s engineers are, and have proven time and again, among the best in the world and are certainly no worse than their competitors. But competence is not everything.

I recently quoted James Clear (You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.), and this lesson confirms exactly that: culture dictates systems, which in turn dictate how skills are used. The system worked as it was supposed to and produced what it was supposed to produce, regardless of the excellence of the talent.

I could just as easily have quoted Deming: “Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets”.

Consequences for collective intelligence

This cultural shift did not only affect product strategy. It also severely damaged internal collaboration and collective intelligence, as has been widely documented elsewhere.

First, technical skills were dispersed among less coordinated and more siloed entities, making it more difficult to mobilize them and weakening synergies between engineers (How Not to Organize In-House Experts: Lessons From Boeing).

Open communication declined: 35% of employees responsible for certification said they did not feel free to speak to the FAA (Boeing Knows What It Needs to Do—So Do It. Change the Culture).

Second, the problem reporting systems (“Speak Up”) were considered unreliable and opaque (Boeing’s Internal Safety Plan: Make Problems Easier to Report).

Finally, the climate of fear and silence was identified as a key factor in the abuses (The impact of a corporate culture without psychological safety: causes and consequences).

Of course, since 2024, efforts have been engaged to correct this: reorganization of teams, greater independence for internal inspectors, anonymous reporting mechanisms, etc. (Boeing needs to change its insular culture, CEO says in company-wide meeting). But as you can imagine, rebuilding a culture of trust takes time, and there is no guarantee that a return to engineering excellence can be achieved without overhauling the dominant management models.

“More with Less” didn’t even deliver on its financial promises

One might think that this managerial drift at least served profitability, but even economically, the results are disappointing.

The Boeing 777, the result of an entirely new program, required a massive investment (nearly $6 billion), but generated an estimated operating margin of between 20% and 25% at peak maturity. Its internal rate of return (IRR) is estimated at nearly 19% (The Boeing 777), which ranks it among the most profitable programs in the industry.

Conversely, the 737 MAX program, a “simple” derivative of a 1960s aircraft, promised savings but resulted in colossal losses. Despite an estimated unit margin of 10–15% in its cruising phase (Here’s how much Boeing is estimated to make on each 737 Max 8 plane), the costs associated with the crises (crashes, groundings, compensation) exceed $18 billion (Financial impact of the Boeing 737 MAX groundings).

In both cases, it took between 8 and 10 years to reach profitability, but the trajectory differs radically: the 777 followed a controlled ramp-up, while the MAX had to weather a crisis of reputation, safety, and governance.

And one detail speaks volumes: Boeing has never disclosed the internal rate of return for the MAX program, which is in itself an indication.

Bottom line

What Boeing’s story teaches us is not the danger of a bad slogan, or even of a change in strategic direction, but the very real risk of a toxic alignment between a short-term management culture and execution without checks and balances. At Boeing, “More with Less” was indeed implemented with rigor and discipline, but at the cost of a systemic impoverishment of collaboration, expertise, and collective discernment. The greatest risk is not the inconsistency between discourse and reality, but when everything is perfectly consistent in the service of a bad vision.

Illustration: generated by AI via ChatGPT.