Capturing the essence of Boeing

Phil Condit
Chairman and CEO

What is Boeing? It is "people working together as a global enterprise for aerospace leadership" as set out in our Vision 2016 statement.

But there's an added dimension that's more difficult to describe. It's the energy, creativity and enthusiasm that diverse and highly capable people generate working together globally to plan, sell, design, build and support some of the most advanced products, technologies and systems in existence.

This issue of Frontiers helps capture the Boeing spirit. The 40-page photo essay inside tracks the heartbeat of Boeing—its people, products and services—through the course of a single workday on locations that range across six continents and most of the 24 time zones.

It not only shows Boeing employees across the United States—from Cape Canaveral and Philadelphia to Wichita, Anaheim and the Puget Sound area—performing tasks from complex space cargo checkout to detailing the logo on a new airliner. It also documents the efforts of Boeing people all over the world as they work to expand the company's global business and help Boeing gain access to new and developing markets.

Our people, and the integrity that is so much a part of us all, are making a fundamental difference by helping to preserve freedom worldwide while providing the products, services and technologies the world needs to improve lives amid rapid change.

Nobody else can match the range of things Boeing can do. No other company can design and build big commercial airplanes, integrate missile defense, design and produce advanced military aircraft and design and build sophisticated unmanned systems.

We have the financial depth to take big swings at new ideas.

Our core competencies also give Boeing a tremendous advantage. Nobody in the world can teach the large-scale systems integration that we do every day; nobody knows the detail of customer knowledge and focus that Boeing people know. Indeed, if you were to go out and start a company like Boeing or one of its business units today, it would be years and years before you could bring together the set of skills to effectively do what this company does.

I've frequently said Boeing, its people and its products will be as big a part of history in the 21st century as we were in the 20th century. I believe Boeing is uniquely positioned, much as it was at the start of the last century, in a technological area that will advance at prodigious rates. Much of it will revolve around networkcentric operations—the next level of integration.

Similar to big aerospace advances in the past, the big advances in network-centric operations will be driven by our military customers, then followed by commercial aviation, where it has enormous implications. Linking commercial aviation with network-centric systems—such as the satellite-based air traffic management system Boeing is proposing—this company can revolutionize an industry.

The reality is, the things Boeing does are exciting. Just picture how much things changed in the 25 years from 1935 to 1960, when the industry went from 350-mph propeller airplanes to flight at three times the speed of sound and Sputnik. I believe that the people of Boeing will be instrumental in powering the same kind of monumental change in the next quarter-century.

We can open those new frontiers.