Blake Scholl

There was a sort of GE mindset that made its way to Boeing through McDonnell Douglas that was kind of the Jack Welch playbook.

The way you succeed in business is to know what Wall Street thinks you're going to do next quarter and beat it by a nickel.

If you do that successfully through whatever machinations, you can make the stock price go up and to the right.

It works great until the day it doesn't.

The way you do that is by cutting a lot of long-term stuff.

And so the way Boeing ended up getting run was quarter to quarter.

A lot of people say they got too focused on money and so they didn't care about safety.

And I don't think that's quite true.

And if you look at the results of their lack of focus on safety, it was the biggest financial disaster they'd ever had.

They didn't pay off financially.

The problem was their financial focus was short range.

not long-range.

Phil Condit left in 2004.

I think he was the last good CEO over there.

I'm fortunate to have him on our board now.

After that, we had people like Jim McNerney who explicitly said, hey, no more moonshots, and they meant no more new products.

And I remember hearing that at the time, and I was in my 20s living in Seattle.

Actually, I was living in a building called Concord.

Maybe this is my destiny.

Are you serious?