People are basis of Boeing culture

Phil Condit
Chairman and CEO

This month's issue of Boeing Frontiers focuses on two subjects — how running a healthy business helps us build healthy communities, and how we are moving forward after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

When you look at these two topics in context, the central thread of our Boeing fabric emerges: the basic integrity of our corporate culture and the character of the people who give life to that culture with their everyday actions.

While Boeing encourages its senior executives to serve on not-for-profit agency boards, there is a far more widespread tradition in Boeing — that the company and its people contribute to the welfare of their local communities and to the world community at large. This tradition is driven neither from the top down nor the bottom up. Instead, it is simply a part of our individual personalities and a basic tenet of our collective culture: Boeing people help others. We connect and protect people not only through the products and services that we bring to our customers, but also through how we live our lives and what we do on our own time.

Boeing people find a variety of ways to contribute to local communities and charitable efforts around the world (see story). While we donate portions of our paychecks to the Boeing Employees Community Fund or directly to other worthy organizations, we do much more than give money. We may choose to volunteer our time and talents to improving education, providing a community service or supporting the arts. We may commit to serving our countries in military reserve units. We may contribute our organizational or technical skills to not-for-profit agencies. We may be active in a church, synagogue, mosque or temple. We may simply look in regularly on neighbors who need some help, or we may spend several hours a month picking up trash along a roadside.

As a company, Boeing sets community involvement and investment priorities in a strategic manner by focusing on four areas: education, health and human services, culture and the arts, and civic and environmental organizations. Through its gift-matching program, Boeing matches certain contributions by regular, full-time employees and their spouses, and by retirees, to accredited educational institutions and 501(c)3 cultural institutions (see guidelines).

While we cannot be all things to all people, together we do an enormous amount. And that is significant. When adversity strikes — whether it's an earthquake in Turkey or a terrorist attack in the United States — we respond with outpourings of help, concern and constructive action.

To get an idea of how much difference just one of us makes, read about how the families and co-workers of the three Boeing employees killed in the Sept. 11 attacks are coping (see story). The families and friends of Dong "D.C." Lee, Ruben Ornedo and Chad Keller can teach us a lot about resilience in times of great difficulty.

Sept. 11 and its impact has brought trauma to Boeing even beyond the tragic loss of these three special individuals. Nearly 30,000 of our coworkers, associated primarily with Boeing Commercial Airplanes and the Shared Services Group, lost their jobs because of circumstances over which they had no control — and that, in turn, has had an enormous impact on their families and on communities that we care very much about.

Yet we are on our way to overcoming the adversity brought on by that terrible act. We look upon our own Boeing security people and firefighters with renewed respect. We honor those — including some of our coworkers — who fight the war against terrorism. We are working hard on homeland security (see story), where we have redirected some of our business and technology objectives to help our government and commercial customers preserve a way of life.

Ultimately, the world is a better place because of Boeing and the people who make this company what it is. Because that's just who we are.