Vision Behind The Boeing 777 Project example essay topic

Boeing controls nearly one hundred percent of the America's civil aviation manufacturing industry. Boeing's impact on the U.S. economy is enormous. Besides, aviation is one of the largest export industries in the United States. Boeing's organizational system is composed of the activities of human beings. These activities become a system by virtue of the fact that they are coordinated. The activities are not confined to the behavior of members or employees of the organization.

In this research I will analyze how external and internal forces have shape Boeing's organizational behavior. Since the engineering work at Boeing has to be performed under a relevant time pressure, activities that can be anticipated are consequently performed in parallel, reducing the cycle time. Some participants to the restructured routine that had previously worked on similar tasks with different projects reported that in their former projects, since activities were less clearly defined in highly detailed procedures, it was harder to subvert the customary sequence of actions - which implied a much longer cycle time. Thus, the formal procedure is not merely executed nor ignored, but instead it is used as a resource for manipulating the list of activities and restructuring their position in time.

Organizations are complex social systems and, as a result, are likely to be subject to a large number of epi static interactions. This suggests that the mapping from organizational form to effectiveness measures, whether these measures are survival rates as in production analysis or financial performance as in the case of many applications of contingency theory, may be exceedingly complex. In particular, there is unlikely to be a unique mapping from an effectiveness measure to organizational forms and the observed distribution of forms is likely to reflect both the demands of the environment and Boeing's unique history that has led it to a particular peak in the landscape. To the extent that variation in organizational form results from a process of search and adaptation, then the observed variation in forms may have more to do with an organization's structure at founding than current market contingencies. The impact of initial imprinting persists even though organizations engage in considerable adaptation. Boeing's top management has a far greater effect on developing the employees' ethics than will their peer group.

The match of ethical expectations should also lead to a long-term organization and employee commitment to the persistence of ethical behavior. Boeing's engineering department has experienced the benefits of managing the employee-employer contract with their employees in their efforts to create and maintain an ethically oriented organization. Another method that is gaining popularity is the implementation of ethics training programs. Boeing has even gone to the point of implementing an ethics program to aid engineers when confronted with an ethical decision. Corporations that have not been guilty of wrongdoing have initiated formal ethics programs in an effort to avoid public-relations problems, raise engineers' morale and productivity, and make their organizations more honest. Nonetheless, the match between applicant values and the leader's vision may become equally as important.

Executives will likely select their top management team according to the congruence they see between their own vision and the values displayed by potential applicants. For example, Frank Shrontz, the former CEO and chairman of Boeing, developed the vision behind the Boeing 777 project and reflected this vision in his subsequent staffing of the project. He envisioned an engineering process that was technologically advanced, functionally interdisciplinary, and more efficient in terms of product delivery. These goals became the basis for a new way of operating that Shrontz urged for his company. However, they were also readily apparent in the values of the executives he hired to implement this project, Philip Condit and Alan Mullally. Both men were viewed by their colleagues and employees as people oriented with an ability to integrate different functional perspectives, key qualities, and values that were important to the vision that Shrontz espoused..