Whistleblowers are usually relatively powerless employees who disclose damaging information about their relatively powerful employers. Such as, for example, workplace practices that are unsafe, illicit, or fraudulent. Think of whistleblowers as Davids going up against Goliaths – which is why, in the United States, they have legal protections which tend, however, to be insufficient.
Robert Barnett was a whistleblower. After having worked at The Boeing Company for 32 years, in 2017 he left. Two years later he blew the whistle against his former employer. He charged that the once iconic company was regularly engaging in shoddy practices that were compromising the safety of the airliners it was making and then selling worldwide. Five years after that – earlier this month – according to the coroner’s report Barnett shot himself dead in the head. He died a week after having given a formal deposition against Boeing, and on a day that he was scheduled to undergo further questioning.
We can never know why Barnett killed himself or even for certain if he killed himself. Conspiracy theories being rampant these days, no surprise there are rumors that instead of his gunshot wound being self-inflicted he was shot by someone else. What we do know though is that within days after Barnett died, the CEO of Boeing, David Calhoun, announced that before this year was out, he was out. He was leaving the company. Same with Larry Kellner, chair of Boeing’s board who similarly announced his pending departure.
Neither Calhoun nor Kellner can be said to have retired voluntarily. At least indirectly they were pressured to do so by airlines and regulators on account of a series of events that instead of salvaging Boeing’s already tenuous reputation, under their leadership it was damaged further. In his resignation statement Calhoun admitted as much, referring to the now infamous incident on January 5 when a door plug blew off an Air Alaska Boeing 737 Max, which left the aircraft, while it was still aloft, with a gaping hole. Amazingly no one was seriously hurt in the incident. But it was yet another in a recent series of Boeing close calls including multiple malfunctions and fuel leaks. In his resignation statement Calhoun wrote, “As you all know, the Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 accident was a watershed moment for Boeing. We must continue to respond to this accident with humility and complete transparency. We must also inculcate a total commitment to safety and quality at every level of our company.”
Though presumably unintended, Calhoun’s statement was a supreme irony. Because just four years earlier he was hired as chief executive to do just that: to inculcate at Boeing “a total commitment to safety and quality at every level.”
When Calhoun came on board, in January 2020, the pressure on the company to up its game could not have been greater. For his immediate predecessor, now former CEO Dennis Muilenburg, had presided over a period during which the company had endured not one but two catastrophes, and not one but two crises.
Boeing is not the focus of my new book, Leadership from Bad to Worse: What Happens When Bad Festers. But I do briefly describe what happened to the company in 2018 and 2019. First were two deadly crashes of its 737 Max airliner: one, in October 2018, off the coast of Indonesia in which everyone on board, 189 passengers and crew, died; the other just a few months later, in March 2019, in Ethiopia, in which everyone on board, 157 people, also died.
Crisis number one was, then, a crisis of performance, of Boeing’s performance as a manufacturer of aircraft that were supposed to be of the highest quality and unimpeachable safety. And crisis number two was one of public relations. While the company was enduring a PR nightmare it became evident that its chief executive, Muilenburg, was miserably ineffective at calming the waters. In December 2019 there was for instance this headline in the New York Times: “At Boeing, C.E.O. Stumbles Deepen a Crisis.” I wrote in Leadership from Bad to Worse that, “By then the 737 Max had been grounded, but Muilenburg’s leadership during this period was in every way also badly lacking.” Moreover, his expressions of regret seemed not to make things better but worse. They were described as “clumsy” and “only prolonging Boeing’s reputational pain.”
Enter in early 2020 the man ostensibly on a white horse, the leader who would save Boeing from its badly injured self, Calhoun. But instead of saving Boeing, under Calhoun questions of quality control, of “shortcuts”, of workers with insufficient experience and expertise persisted. Which makes his somewhat ignominious departure painful not only for those within Boeing but for those without. For Boeing is one of just two plane makers – it shares a duopoly with Europe’s Airbus – that produces and sells large commercial jets to airlines.
In recent years Boeing has by every measure and wide agreement lost ground to Airbus. Which raises key questions: Can Boeing be restored to its previous place at the pinnacle of performance excellence? Can the company recover from what has become an onslaught of damage to its once vaunted reputation? What kind of leadership team is required to enable Boeing to fulfill its ostensible mission, to commit totally to “safety and quality at every level”? How to get everyone in the company on board, to persuade every Boeing employee that they are integral, critical to finding enduring solutions to enduring problems?
Last Thursday, United Airlines flight 990 was on its way from San Francisco to Paris. But because the crew reported a problem with an engine the plane was diverted to Denver. 273 passengers and 12 crew members got safely off the plane and the flight was simply cancelled. A scare? Perhaps. An inconvenience? Absolutely. But why was the incident newsworthy? Because the aircraft was made by Boeing. And because it was made by Boeing was serious concern about the performance of its product.
Boeing must persuade both the experts and the flying public that its planes are as safe as any now flying the skies. Until it does, Barnett’s ghost will continue to haunt the company’s corridors. For whatever the truth of what happened before he blew the whistle, and after, his warnings about Boeing proved prophetic.