by Jeff Childers
Finally! It’s about dang time. They held out as long as they could. Bloomberg ran the story yesterday headlined, “Boeing Dismantles DEI Team as Pressure Builds on New CEO.” The company’s brand-new CEO has announced a radical, controversial new hiring concept that you probably never heard of: they call it merit-based hiring. Ideas like that are why these CEOs make the big bucks and you and I aren’t even in the running.
Maybe it’s fairer to say that Boeing’s new CEO makes the big bucks by being brave enough to even saying merit-based hiring out loud. Doesn’t he realize that hiring for merit is inherently racist because of patriarchy and other woke buzzwords?
If he didn’t know that, I bet he finds out soon.
And guess who blew out Boeing’s DEI door plug? None less than Cuban-American conservative filmmaker Robby Starbuck, who corporate media likes to call an “anti-DEI activist.” Robby only asked, that’s all:
Robby deserves tons of credit, but at this point, having marooned several astronauts, crashed their newest plane, being under multiple criminal investigations, and after shedding plane wheels faster than a toddler carrying an open can of puffed cereal, I’m guessing all Boeing needed was an excuse.
Boeing was, in many ways, as much sinned against than sinning. As a massive federal defense contractor, Boeing was subjected to the vicissitudes and vagaries of the ever-shifting, sulphuric winds of political correctness blowing from Washington. My personal theory is Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion was enemy action, probably Chinese, evidenced by the fact that DEI does not exist outside the West, and even exists in Western countries, like the Nordics, which lack any history of minority oppression.
So, in that sense, DEI was inflicted on Boeing and other companies. Of course, these companies also failed to resist, even as their planes’ engines kept bursting into flames every time they turned around. Boeing yielded to greedy temptation; at first, DEI came packaged with delicious free candy in the form of incentives like competitive advantages for lucrative, overpriced government contracts.
At bottom, on a personal level, DEI is bad enough. But it also casts ripples of toxic downstream side effects that corrupt corporate culture. For one thing, DEI destroys accountability, and not just for the DEI hires themselves, who sport DEI armor against any and all criticism of their poor work product, bad grammar, or being late. That kind of criticism can only, after all, be racist and sexist and homophobic and on top of that, most recently, white supremacist.
Arguably even worse, DEI destroys managerial accountability. First, it shifts corporate managers’ incentives away from performance-based metrics toward goals related to hiring people with particular skin colors and atypical sexual preferences. Managers get double-bonused for hiring people both with rare skin colors and who also have unusual sexual appetites.
That is bad enough. But DEI hiring quotas also give managers unaccountability armor similar to the anti-criticism force fields surrounding their bonus-eligible hires. If a middle manager’s department or unit underperforms by delivering quality products or services, that manager can just explain away the underperformance, as a necessary cost of meeting the higher priority goal of hiring people for their inherent characteristics that have nothing to do with their job skills.
It was, in hindsight, completely predictable. If companies wanted to quickly pack the ranks with people who look a certain way or have sex a certain way, to increase their federal bid-review scores, then merit must take a back seat. It’s simple priorities. One easily imagines upper management de facto relaxing traditional performance standards in light of requiring middle managers to compromise on merit.
At first, this tradeoff could actually have been worthwhile, since higher DEI-based bid scores conferred measurable advantages in securing fabulously lucrative government projects. But once all the big companies had followed suit, so that they all earned similar DEI points, the contracting advantages evaporated, with the result that SpaceX blew Boeing off its launch pads.
Anyway, I am glad to see Boeing returning to something resembling sanity. With any luck, other companies will follow Boeing’s lead.
The first paragraph should have had a drip pan under it, to catch the sarcasm. Well played, well played indeed.
Oh my, the truth has escaped and the falsifiers are on fire.