Boeing's Innovative Approach to

Leadership
Boeing's progressive view of leadership allowed innovation to
flourish.
The creation of an innovation culture that rescued the Boeing
Co.'s C-17 Globemaster program from the brink of cancellation in
the early 1990s would not have been possible without "courageous
leadership," former C-17 program manager David Bowman notes
in the foreword to "The Rudolph Factor: Finding the Bright Lights
that Drive Innovation in Your Business." However, the book's co-
authors, Cyndi Laurin and Craig Morningstar, take Bowman's
statement one step further, asserting that it was Boeing's
progressive view of leadership that allowed innovation to flourish.
"Within the Boeing C-17 program, it is widely recognized that the
story begins and ends with leadership," Laurin and Morningstar
write. "We are not saying it begins and ends with the positional
leaders or management -- but with a new definition of
leadership."
Perhaps the epitome of the C-17 program's progressive leadership
philosophy is Bowman, who defines leadership as "connecting
people to their future." Bowman, now vice president and general
manager, Global Mobility Systems, Boeing Defense, Space and
Security, describes his definition as a "servanthood model" of
leadership.
"If you're doing it to become CEO, for your own career or for any
other reason other than the people that surround you -- and this
includes family, community and everyone else -- then I would
argue that you're doing something, but it's not leadership,"
Bowman tells IndustryWeek. "Or it's certainly not effective
leadership."
In Boeing's scramble to turn around a program that was plagued
by late deliveries, cost overruns, quality problems and a toxic
culture, Bowman and other C-17 executives concluded that
traditional leadership roles must change. As detailed in "The
Rudolph Factor," Boeing found that engaging the workforce in
innovation requires positional leaders and managers to abandon
the command-and-control style of management that is so
prevalent in business today. Instead, leaders
must employ a more participative approach
and solicit collective ideas from the workforce
rather than imposing initiatives on them.
According to Laurin and Morningstar, senior managers in Boeing's
C-17 program took a bold first step toward establishing this new
leadership paradigm by gathering all 10,000 C-17 employees in a
hangar and communicating their philosophy directly to the front-line
employees -- not through middle management.

"They said, 'Here's what we're going to do. We

need to listen to you. We need to find your
creative ideas. And middle managers, if you
don't fit and buy into this -- you don't fit,'"
Morningstar explains in an interview with IndustryWeek. " That
epic event just changed everything inside the Boeing C-17
culture."
The results have been remarkable. In the span of a few years, the
C-17 program "became the model acquisition program for the U.S.
Air Force," earning the Malcolm Baldridge National Quality
Award in 1998, the authors note. Several formal mechanisms for
capturing and rewarding ideas for innovation have helped the C-
17 program save more than $90 million over the past decade (a
conservative estimate, according to the authors). Laurin and
Morningstar also point out that some of the best practices and
lessons learned from the Boeing C-17 program's cultural
transformation are being replicated in other areas of the
company.