Opinion: Boeing’s new boss should drop the suit and consider a hoodie

Opinion by Tim Hubbard

(CNN) — Shortly after taking over Boeing from Dennis Muilenburg — who was fired for abysmal performance following two fatal 737 Max 8 crashes — David Calhoun said, “We had a backup plan. I am the backup plan.”

Now Boeing needs a backup to the backup. The foundations of Boeing and its culture have not improved enough under Calhoun’s leadership.

Monday’s announcement that he would leave Boeing at the end of the year marks an important inflection point for the once-great aerospace company and an opportunity to change its direction.

But an important question persists: Who should take over as CEO of Boeing? What does the portrait of an ideal leader for Boeing look like?

At its foundation, the board of directors needs to select the new CEO based on three criteria: Boeing’s new CEO needs to signal change, embody the company they want Boeing to become and be driven by the goal of leaving a positive legacy.

Boeing’s new CEO needs to signal change. Much like when the tech industry adopted the hoodie to signal an intention to do things differently, the aerospace giant needs its own iconic look, and this could be its opportunity. When employees, regulators and the public meet the new CEO, they need to see change. Those characteristics could be the way the new CEO speaks, the way they look, the background they have, the way they dress or their attitude.

The current baseline to overcome is easy to spot: an older corporate veteran from General Electric with a degree in accounting wearing a black suit and tie. While it’s easy to say that optics shouldn’t matter, they do, and they can have a powerful effect. Imagine a 40-something nerdy engineer with a long-term orientation who is able to stand up to Wall Street and the board of directors to take the pressure off immediate performance.

Boeing’s new CEO needs to embody the company the board wants Boeing to become. If the board of directors wants to see the same — a relentless focus on profitability, $59 billion returned to shareholders over a decade, crashes, safety incidents and disdain from the public — we know what that looks like.

On the other hand, if the board wants the company to return to its image as an engineering and manufacturing powerhouse with an intense focus on innovation and quality, we also know what that looks like. That’s an aerospace engineer who has designed planes, a mechanical engineer who has manufactured planes or a product quality manager who has inspected planes.

That person wants to walk around the engineering labs, stroll the manufacturing floor, visit customers’ airplane hangars and sit through quality meetings. They must be able to “speak” engineering. With an engineering background, they would have the capability and the mandate to lead a change back to the company’s roots and shrug off the short-termism that I believe is the source of its woes. This is not the time to hire an executive with experience in crisis management, cost accounting or political lobbying. This is a time to hire the leader who can actually lead a technology and manufacturing giant, not allow it to limp along from crisis to crisis.

Boeing’s new CEO needs to be driven by leaving a positive legacy, where the company is in a purposeful state and has the momentum to sustain its competitive advantage long after their departure. It’s about the future success of the company, not current gains.

If the new CEO needs a blueprint of what their legacy could look like, they need only read up on the not-so-recent history of Boeing. They will read about massive technological advancements, deep manufacturing expertise and the ability to dream. The stories will describe senior managers walking the factory and engineering floors, all while being financially successful. Through Boeing’s own history, they can envision a talented, excited employee base working together in open dialog to build iconic products.

This CEO is out there. What I have described is not a corporate unicorn. The worst thing Boeing’s board could do would be to settle on more of the same. The company and the public need change.

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