The Boeing Company was formed in 1916 by William E. Boeing in Seattle, Washington. The following year they had a twenty eight person payroll which included pilots, carpenters, boat builders and seamstresses. The lowest wage was fourteen cents an hour, while the company's top pilots made two to three hundred dollars a month. When the company was short on money, William Boeing used his own financial resources to guarantee a loan to cover all wages, which was a total of about seven hundred a week. ("Boeing History," n.d) In 1997, they merged with McDonnell Douglas and are currently the world's largest aerospace company and leading manufacturer of commercial airliners and defense, space and security systems. With …show more content…
The following table shows how Boeings revenue compares with their competitors in the aerospace industry.
Leaders in Total Revenue
Boeing $65.7B
Lockheed Martin $47.2B
Honeywell Intl $36.8B
General Dynamics $32.1B
L-3 Communications $15.4B
Goodrich Corporation $7.7B
Huntington Ingalls Industries $6.6B
Embraer $5.4B
Rockwell Collins $4.8B
(Yahoo Finance, 2012) W. James McNerney, Jr., is chairman of the board, president and chief executive officer of Boeing. Before taking the lead at Boeing in 2005, McNerney held the position as chairman of the board and CEO of 3M and is a director of Procter & Gamble, a director of IBM, a member of The Field Museum Board of Trustees in Chicago, a trustee of Northwestern University, and a member of the Northwestern Memorial HealthCare Board (The Boeing Company, 2012). He was also appointed by President Obama as chair of the President's Export Council, which operates as an advisory committee on international trade.
In his annual letter to the shareholders, McNerney lays the foundation for successful leadership and bright future for the company. His five critical elements are: innovation and technological leadership, unrelenting focus on productivity to continuously fund growth, global scale and flexibility, enterprise collaboration that leverages the breadth and depth of the companies capabilities and a highly skilled and motivated employee team whom learns from mistakes (The Boeing Company, 2011).