The move to Chicago was in 2001. Obama did not become president until 2009. It was a deliberate move to distance corporate headquarters from the commercial airplane business in Seattle (which some board members thought "cramped" Boeing's business strategy) and to be less time-zone sensitive to business operations on both coasts. There was also the suspicion that the top brass wanted to show off a skyscraper for headquarters.
The new move to the Washington DC area is a reflection of the "Government Suck-Up" business model that the largely legacy McDonnell management prefers.
I worked 40 years for Boeing in Seattle and the 1997 merger was the worst thing that happened to us. We were the victims of the General Electric / Jack Welch theory of business management.
MacDac (as we called them) had nothing to bring to the table. They had lean-sized their operation so much that when orders began to increase for their DC-9s and DC-10s, they had no production capacity with which to increase the output. When the merger happened, it meant the doom of the former Douglas aircraft component.
The bright idea was that by merging, the Company would be more "balanced" with respect to civilian and military production, one side going up to balance the other going down, in the characteristic waves of the industry. The only problem is that the work forces were not co-located, so there was never any benefit of real balance.
The move to Chicago was in 2001. Obama did not become president until 2009. It was a deliberate move to distance corporate headquarters from the commercial airplane business in Seattle (which some board members thought "cramped" Boeing's business strategy) and to be less time-zone sensitive to business operations on both coasts. There was also the suspicion that the top brass wanted to show off a skyscraper for headquarters.
The new move to the Washington DC area is a reflection of the "Government Suck-Up" business model that the largely legacy McDonnell management prefers.
I worked 40 years for Boeing in Seattle and the 1997 merger was the worst thing that happened to us. We were the victims of the General Electric / Jack Welch theory of business management.
MacDac (as we called them) had nothing to bring to the table. They had lean-sized their operation so much that when orders began to increase for their DC-9s and DC-10s, they had no production capacity with which to increase the output. When the merger happened, it meant the doom of the former Douglas aircraft component.
The bright idea was that by merging, the Company would be more "balanced" with respect to civilian and military production, one side going up to balance the other going down, in the characteristic waves of the industry. The only problem is that the work forces were not co-located, so there was never any benefit of real balance.
The article said they're going to Virginia.