THIS EDITION OF MISCmedia is dedicated to the memory of William Hanna, whose TV cartoons entranced millions of kids (and whose early, low-budget shows helped demystify the animation and filmmaking processes for thousands of those kids).
AS YOU MAY HAVE HEARD BY NOW, the Boeing Co. announced one of its periodic reorganizations the other day.
It’s gonna group its own heritage assets, and the assets it’s bought from Lockheed, McDonnell Douglas, and General Motors into three main groups, each of which would act more like a stand-alone company with its own management and offices (and, potentially, its own “tracking stock” IPO). At the top would be a slimmed-down corporate headquarters–which won’t be in Seattle (or St. Louis or Long Beach, where two of the three operating groups will be based).
So Boeing’s gonna become just another rootless global corporation, and have a head office not where any of its main plants are but whereever it can wring “job blackmail” deals from the local authorities and/or wherever the top execs would prefer to live.
The official reason given, that the company needs to be based someplace with “cultural diversity” and “a pro-business climate,” is, as everyone here knows, B.S. Our local and state politicians have spent their collective professional lifetimes doing whatever the Lazy B wanted. And as for the diversity part, there’s a whole world out in Seattle’s neighborhoods and suburbs that the Coldwater Creek store and the other promoters of Demographic Correctness couldn’t even imagine.
So let’s imagine the potential real reasons:
By having a head office physically removed from all manufacturing operations, Boeing’s proclaiming itself to the stock markets and the corporate community that it’s gonna be a company run by salespeople and financiers for salespeople and financiers, not an “old economy” company making specific products for specific customers. It’ll be a company whose real “bottom line” isn’t its operating profit but its stock price. A company that’ll do anything for the sake of short-term upturns–even take moves that could sacrifice its long-term position (such as giving away wing-design technology to the Japanese).
And if the top execs move to Texas, they’ll have more potential clout when pushing new military contracts from a Texan-run White House.
One potentially ironic note was that the top brass had apparently been bitching among themselves about all the flying around they had to do to go from Seattle to other Boeing sites and to Washington, DC lobbying sessions. (If you don’t like airline travel, guys, get into some other line of work than trying to promote more airline travel.)
NEXT: Some more of this.
ELSEWHERE:
