You have to give Stonecipher credit, he lived up to his promise.
Article spells it all out.
What was it about this McDonnell Douglas merger in 1996 and 1997 that changed the company culture at Boeing? Leon Grunberg: “That’s the key question, I think. As Cynthia mentioned, they brought in a cutthroat culture with a new vision, and a new ethos. The two primary shareholders were John McDonnell, one of the McDonnell Douglas. And Harry Stonecipher, who was the CEO of McDonnell Douglas. So they became the largest shareholders. And essentially a lot of the top executives were imported from McDonnell Douglas. And what's really interesting is that in 2004, Stonecipher then became CEO of Boeing, actually made it very explicit that the intention was to change the culture. He said … that was the intention. ‘So that it’s run’ — this is a quote – ‘So it's run like a business rather than a great engineering [firm].’”
“As a lot of employers told us, the bean-counters, the finance guys, became the dominant people in the company. The ethos was to sort of chase shareholder value about everything. And that became the, sort of, that trickle-down across the whole management ranks. And that became the sort of dominant paradigm. And it led to a whole bunch of effects.”
https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2020/01...esolved-issues