Comment by wahern

From the [archived] contemporaneous articles I've read it was Boeing's CEO and Chairman, Condit, who pushed heavily for the merger. Condit engineered the exit of Boeing's CFO, a skeptic, as part of an unfolding strategy to replace much of Boeing's original executive staff with those from McDonnell Douglas.[1] And he had the board's support as the Boeing board was enamored of McDonnell Douglas executives' financial engineering strategies.

So while it may have nominally been McDonnell Douglas' culture that ruined Boeing, it was also very much an inside job. Boeing's leadership had already been fatally infected years prior and invited McDonnell Douglas in with the intention and purpose of adopting their culture.[2] The demise of Boeing culture was a fait accompli before the merger.

This notion that Boeing was a victim is revisionist. To the extent it was a victim, it was a victim of the wider business and finance culture. There's no need to spin conspiracy theories about how it happened; it happened in the normal course of things, unfortunately. While Condit was clearly the immediate driver, the choice of Condit as CEO years earlier wasn't accidental.

[1] "The exit by Givan, 62, who has held the post of Boeing finance chief and senior vice president since 1990, stems in part from disagreements with other executives over the conservative accounting methods used by Givan, say people close to the matter. For example, some officials believe he was too stringent in assessing how Boeing would accumulate charges for problems incurred in the course of its commercial-airplane order boom." https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=19980715&slug...

[2] "'When people say I [Condit] changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it's run like a business rather than a great engineering firm.'" https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/how-boeing...