Boeing bought out McDonald Douglas for their production capability when they had a backlog of orders for comercial planes and MD's commercial business had tanked. Lots of other rumors as to other motivation like EADS (Airbus)wanting MD also. Along with the commercial production capability Boeing got a huge Defence contract business.
So Boeing's #1, Phil Condit, makes the deal with MD's Harry Stonecipher and hires him as Boeings #2 man. Harry convinces Phil that Boeing(who's #1) is doing it all wrong and should do it like MD(that tanked) and divest all manufacturing capability in favor of outsourceing and just do assembly.
Condit knocks up his secretary and because his wife is a Seattle socialite (oxymoron?) has to move Boeing to Chicago and says he
doesn't care if Boeing makes planes or not as long as they make money on their investment. Bill Boeing hits 2700rpm in his grave.
From the Wright Bros on down, the secret of aircraft is in the wings. Boeing has always bought parts from suppliers all over the world as a part of sales deals. They even took partial payment for one plane in berries that they had to sell freeze dried to a cereal producer. Anyway the next plane (7E7 Dreamliner) will have the wings produced in Japan. When they can build wings, why do they need Boeing? Wall Street is asking!
EADS (Airbus) is owned and heavily subsidized by several European Governments so they can sell cheap to get into the market.
On the Defence side the former MD people hired some of their competitors people who in turn brought proprietary information with them. Only 3 or 4 people at very high level involved but the Government found out and Boeing had a billion dollars in contracts taken away.
Meanwhile Mike Sears the CFO at the urging of an employee talks to Ms Runyan about working for Boeing. The employee is Ms Runyans daughter, and at the time Ms Runyan was negotiating for the Government with Boeing on this Airforce Tanker deal. Looks bad, you know, but the kicker was when it came to light they both tried to cover it up. They're gone.
Remember Stonesipher? He retired as #2 man awhile ago and has been working as a Boeing director, so when the board of directors canned Condit, Stonecipher slid from the board right into #1 spot.
It's all downhill from here.
