Boeing's CEO ups business while rebutting reputation

Old-school techniques help Boeing's CEO restore order.
CHICAGO (AP) -- Boeing Co.'s boss is pushy, aggressive and loath to compromise.
That's the way Harry Stonecipher sees himself -- with no punches pulled.
The plainspoken son of a Tennessee coal miner seems to be what the aerospace giant needed at a time when its defense business was drifting into trouble and uncertainty. Formerly the company's chief operating officer, Stonecipher marched out of a golf-filled, 11/2-year retirement in Florida and into the chief executive's suite last December.
So far, this old-school manager appears to have restored order. The year after Boeing was buffeted by contract scandals, the company's stock price is up 30 percent, the business outlook has improved and so has morale at its signature commercial aircraft unit despite the protracted aviation slowdown since 2001.
Business upswing
Much of that resurgence is due to brightened industry prospects, heavy U.S. military spending and the new 7E7 airplane project that was conceived on the watch of his predecessor, Phil Condit. But a significant amount of the credit also goes to the craggy-faced, gravel-voiced Stonecipher, who at 68 appears to be reveling in a return to long workdays and in imposing his style of decisiveness and financial discipline at America's leading exporter.
"I tell people, 'There's no action items that are on my desk when I leave at night -- none,'" Boeing's president and CEO said in a recent interview at company headquarters. "And the first thing I do in the morning at about 4:30 or 5 o'clock is I'm on the computer. If you're anywhere in the world and you need an answer from Harry, you're going to get it."
Plenty of answers were expected when Stonecipher was called in hurriedly last Dec. 1 to replace Condit, who resigned under pressure with Boeing's integrity in question over dubious methods used to win lucrative government deals.
Besides trying to restore the company's sullied reputation, Stonecipher's top priority has been to save a multibillion-dollar tanker deal with the Air Force that remains in limbo amid a series of investigations. Acknowledging that some employees did "really dumb things," he has been assuring Capitol Hill and the Pentagon that the company is not "a bunch of crooks."
Making changes
He also has cut costs, reduced a top-heavy executive bureaucracy and pushed his troops to get going with 7E7 construction. And he's not hunkering down when it comes to Airbus, which surpassed Boeing to become the world's No. 1 airplane maker last year -- Stonecipher has been on the attack against the rival recently for what he calls unfair European government support.
Boeing has a long way to go to overcome its ethical missteps even if no one else is implicated, and no CEO's performance can be fully assessed so soon. But there seems to be a consensus that, as aerospace analyst Nicolas Owens of Morningstar Inc. put it, Stonecipher has done "a pretty good job" so far.
"His reputation for taking the bull by the horns is deserved," Owens said. "He hasn't minced words."
Stonecipher has overhauled ethics policies and required every employee to sign a new code of conduct or lose their job.
Seemingly encouraging the notion of a "softer" Stonecipher, the CEO disputes the stern, "no-nonsense" label often applied to him, saying he tries to bring a light touch to everything he does. Witness the life-size cardboard cutout of him that greets visitors to his 36th-floor corner office.
His protest is mild, however. After all, there are benefits to having a tough-guy reputation.
"I do get pretty intense sometimes," he acknowledged. "I won't spend any time trying to change that [image] at all. Because quite frankly, the people who hire me and pay me, that's what they want -- they want no-nonsense."