Stonecipher sold off giant parts-making operations, including a factory in Wichita that Boeing had owned for seventy-five years and employed seventy-two hundred people. It may have improved the RONA numbers, but it made everyone’s jobs harder. Now when they needed a part at the last minute or had an idea for a process improvement, it wasn’t a call with a colleague; it was a negotiation with lawyers, procurement-chain executives, human-resources representatives—all the overhead hassles Hart-Smith had warned about in his treatise.
