Flight plan from Seattle

Boeing is the world’s most successful aircraft maker. In the last thirty years not much has changed. The problem, Philip Condit says, is not just that employees at Boeing think of other countries as being exotic. They have the same attitude to anywhere in the US outside Seattle, where the company has its headquarters and its most important factories. Boeing staff talk about something as being “in-plant” or “out-plant”. In-plant means Seattle. Out-plant means one of the group’s other locations, such as Wichita or Kansas.

Candid wants to change all that. Over the next 20 years, he wants Boeing to become a global rather than a US company. Candid believes that Boing cannot stand still. There are too many examples in aviation and other sectors of what has happened to companies that have tried to do that.

Last year, in his speech to managers he described his vision of what the group would look like in 2016. He told them that Boeing would be a “global enterprise”. This would mean increasing the number of countries of operation. He is impressed, he says, by the way in which oil companies have benefited from losing national images. “BP is probably the most global company in the world. It is interesting to see that in the US its nationality has begun to disappear. Almost everyone in the US says BP and not British Petroleum. It is a local kind of company.” Royal Dutch/Shell is another group which manages to present itself as a local company in the countries in which it operates.

Would he be happy if 20 years from now people did not think of Boeing as being a US company? “Yes,” Candid says, “I believe that we are moving towards an era of global markets and global companies”.

1. What do Boeing employees think of a foreign country?

2. Why is their attitude to Seatle different?

3. What does Candid want Boeing to become in the near future?

4. Have oil companies become global?