Boeing's Innovative Approach to Leadership

IndustryWeek (Cable) - Boeing's progressive view of leadership allowed innovation to flourish.

In Boeing's scramble to turn around a program that was plagued by late deliveries, cost overruns, quality problems and a toxic culture, Bowman and other C-17 executives concluded that traditional leadership roles must change. As detailed in "The Rudolph Factor," Boeing found that engaging the workforce in innovation requires positional leaders and managers to abandon the command-and-control style of management that is so prevalent in business today. Instead, leaders must employ a more participative approach and solicit collective ideas from the workforce rather than imposing initiatives on them.

The results have been remarkable. In the span of a few years, the C-17 program "became the model acquisition program for the U.S. Air Force," earning the Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Award in 1998, the authors note. Several formal mechanisms for capturing and rewarding ideas for innovation have helped the C-17 program save more than $90 million over the past decade (a conservative estimate, according to the authors). Laurin and Morningstar also point out that some of the best practices and lessons learned from the Boeing C-17 program's cultural transformation are being replicated in other areas of the company.