How One CEO Learned to Fly

Boeing chief James McNerney has now made his mark at three major companies. How? "Help others get better," he says.

By Geoffrey Colvin

November 22, 2006

Besides Welch, which people were most important in your development?

I was lucky to have a great dad. He was a professor and a business leader [CEO of Blue Cross Blue Shield Associations], and he had the Welch characteristic—fearlessness about change, fun with change. I tend to be inspired by pieces of people. Look at Steve Jobs and his ability to commercialize innovation. That was the struggle at 3M—there's lots of innovation at the company, but how is it commercialized sustainably? That guy is the best I've known at that, and I have enormous respect for his ability to commercialize innovation.

Research finds that great performers in any field tended to receive a lot of early encouragement from their parents.

There was no question that in our house doing well, doing it the right way, school, sports—there was an expectation. One of the things I've taken away from that is that I'm unafraid to expect a fair amount from people. It makes them so much better—you're doing them a disservice if you don't. I think some of the saddest things in the world are when you don't expect enough from your children. All of sudden they're 21, and they have lower standards than if you'd taken a tougher, higher, bumpier road with them. I pulled that from my father. It probably made me, as my wife tells me, a little overfocused, a little insensitive, a little too goal-oriented, but that's part of the package.

People often draw parallels between sports and other fields. You were enthusiastic about sports—do you see those parallels?

No question, though it's almost trite to say it these days. My sports were team sports, ice hockey and baseball. The whole team dynamic is similar in business. Leadership is earned—the captain earns that role; it's not because he's the coach's son. These are all things we know, but in today's world it's not a bad idea to remind ourselves. When companies lose their way, they lose their way on these fundamental issues of leadership.

Continually pushing oneself to improve is difficult and even painful, and it's largely a mystery why some people do it and others don't. Have you developed any views about that?

[Long pause.] That is such a great question. I do know that there's a restlessness in some people. Go back to Welch. What happened yesterday didn't matter. What happens tomorrow is the only thing that matters, and that's an everyday occurrence. I don't know if it comes from the toilet training, if your parents do expect a lot of you and you're always restlessly trying to grow and meet their expectations. That's a component. Another is that success and achievement can feed on themselves. It feels good to keep succeeding. It feels great to see the people you work with grow and achieve. Maybe the ignition happens when you're younger, and then it feeds on itself. The next question is how you give it to people who weren't fortunate enough to have it given to them when they were young. It gets back to leadership attributes—expect a lot, inspire people, ask them to take the values that are important to them at home or at church and bring them to work.

Do those personal issues apply to a whole company?

Yes, institutionally, the ability to be agile enough is the gut issue in leading an organization today. You need a clear-eyed view of what's really happening in your marketplace and with your competition, of what you're really good at and not good at, which has probably changed over the past ten years. How you lead people in a way that makes them feel good about that, because it means job dislocation—that's the gut issue. If you can develop a team with the personal characteristics we talked about, how does that get institutionalized? That's the leadership challenge we're wrestling with at Boeing, and we're bound and determined to get it right.

1 | 2 < Previous Page