DECEMBER 2016 | 11 “If we keep doing just what we do today, we will not achieve our objectives.” Marc Allen President Boeing International PHOTO BY BOB FERGUSON | BOEING when we get local and agile in any given environment. They come from operating in different places, with different partners. We need those advantages to stay the best in aerospace and to be an enduring global industrial champion. How is this international strategy different from what we have done previously? Part of developing a good strategy is deciding what not to do. Doing everything is doing nothing. Historically, we got comfortable with long lists of “priority” items. One of the principal efforts of Global 2025 has been to take a hard look at the most important countries where additional focus will yield the greatest results. The focus is not static, though. Over time, as investments in priority countries take seed and reach scale, we will swing the spotlight to others. We are also piloting new ways of operating. The goal is agility and pushing more decision-making to the point of operation. And we are launching new approaches to how we develop and manage global talent. These elements all have to work together to drive our success in the global environment. How can employees make Global 2025 successful? You’ll recognize the Global 2025 focus countries that are at the top of the enterprise investment list—none should be a surprise. Understand all the priorities and then make sure your time is aligned to them. That doesn’t mean stop doing the important work you’re doing in other geographic markets. It just means that when you have trade-off decisions to make between markets for your time and resources, follow the priority. Prioritization will drive change. It will also evolve over time. No matter where you work at Boeing, every employee has a role in our international strategy. The majority of our products and services are going to markets outside the United States. Regardless of your physical location, we can’t be successful without a unified approach. So, everybody needs to understand the role they play and go after it with gusto. It sounds like employees can expect a lot of change in the coming years? Yes, this is going to be a time of dynamic change both outside the company—the forces that affect us— and inside the company as we work to be ahead of those forces. But we can change, and we have the right strategy to manage the change, which will allow us to compete. Just look at what we accomplished in our first century. I’m excited for the future because all of us—all 160,000 of us—are the founders of the next century of Boeing. If we keep doing just what we do today, we will not achieve our objectives. But if we grow ourselves, if we take on the opportunities in front of us with a sense of confidence and a forward-looking orientation, we’ll be the company we aspire to be—and an enduring global industrial champion. •
Frontiers December 2016 Issue
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