Phil Condit

In Flying Blind, Phil Condit is the Boeing CEO who personifies the company’s cultural pivot toward shareholder value. He had advanced the “Working Together” motto during the successful 1990s creation of the 777 — and “No one of us is smarter than all of us,” he liked to say — but his tenure is remembered in the book for the McDonnell Douglas merger fallout (“McDonnell Douglas has bought Boeing with Boeing’s money”) and for surprising the workforce with a string of jarring moves, including the public firing of a senior executive (replaced by Alan Mulally).

His signature decision in the memoir is the 2001 relocation of Boeing’s headquarters away from its workers and engineers — announced as “a new, leaner corporate center focused on shareholder value.” Condit framed it as freeing headquarters to think long-term about markets, positioning, and compensation rather than “how-do-you-design-an-airplane stuff.” Flying Blind casts that separation of the corporate center from the factory floor as an early marker of the financialized culture that later produced the 737 MAX disasters.

Context: Philip M. Condit was Boeing’s CEO from 1996 to 2003, overseeing the McDonnell Douglas merger and the headquarters move from Seattle to Chicago. He resigned in 2003 amid a defense-contracting procurement scandal.

Where this appears

• Flying Blind — the Boeing CEO who moved headquarters to a “leaner corporate center focused on shareholder value,” presented as a turning point toward the financialized culture behind the 737 MAX.