By the late 1980s, Boeing needed a new long-range twin-engine jet, and it needed one that airlines would trust from the first day. That last part was the hard part. Airlines flying twin-engine jets over oceans normally had to prove an airplane's reliability in service for a long time before regulators let it fly far from the nearest airport. A brand-new design would usually start out restricted. Boeing was also trying to change how it built airplanes, replacing paper drawings and handoffs between departments with something faster and less prone to expensive surprises.
The engineer at the center of the effort was Alan Mulally. He started on the 777 as its director of engineering and became vice president and general manager of the program in September 1992. The philosophy he carried was called "Working Together," and to be accurate, it was not originally his slogan. It came from Phil Condit, who led the program before moving up in the company. Mulally became known for taking that idea and running the entire program on it, day after day, through the hardest stretches of design and testing.
The first decision was to let the customers in. In January 1990, eight airlines began giving direct input into the airplane's design: United, American, British Airways, Cathay Pacific, Delta, All Nippon Airways, Japan Airlines and Qantas. This was not a focus group at the end of the process. Airline people sat with Boeing engineers while the airplane was still being drawn, and they argued about what it needed to do on real routes with real crews. In October 1990, United placed the launch order for 34 airplanes, with options for 34 more.
The second decision was to break down the walls inside Boeing itself. At the peak of design, the program used 238 design-build teams. Each team brought together the design engineers, the manufacturing engineers who would have to build the part, suppliers, and often airline representatives. The point was to catch problems while they were still lines on a screen rather than parts that did not fit on the factory floor. Boeing even brought in a chief mechanic, Jack Hessburg, to speak for the people who would maintain the airplane, along with line mechanics from Boeing and the airlines. Their suggestions led to small, practical fixes, such as better access to the electronics bay.
The third decision was to design the airplane digitally. The 777 was the first jetliner designed entirely on computers in three dimensions, using a system called CATIA. Boeing worked with IBM and Dassault Systemes to link its design teams, which largely replaced paper drawings and costly physical mockups. Every team could see where its parts would sit next to everyone else's before anything was cut from metal. That shared picture made the cross-team work possible at a scale that paper never could have supported.
Mulally's personal contribution was a habit of insisting that problems be seen early and by everyone. He held regular reviews where every part of the program reported its status, and he has described the color-coded system he later carried to Ford, green for on track, yellow for an issue with a fix underway, red for a serious problem, as something that grew out of his work leading the 777. His core belief fits in five words: "You can't manage a secret." A red status in his meetings was not a confession. It was the start of a group effort to fix it.
The airplane first flew on June 12, 1994, from Everett, Washington, on a flight lasting nearly four hours. It was certified in the spring of 1995 and entered service with United on June 7, 1995, flying from London to Washington, D.C. Then came the result that proved the method. The 777 was approved for 180-minute extended-range twin-engine operations, known as ETOPS, from the moment it entered service. That meant it could fly up to three hours from the nearest suitable airport on its first day, a status that had typically taken airlines about two years of in-service experience to earn.
There is an honest epilogue. Boeing did not keep this way of working. A later analysis of the 787 program described poor communication across teams, unclear authority to make changes and paralysis in decision-making, almost the opposite of what the 777 teams had practiced. Mulally himself left Boeing in 2006 to run Ford, where he used the same weekly review and color-coded transparency to help steer the company through the Great Recession without a government bailout. The method traveled with the man. It did not stay in the building.
That is a warning worth hearing. A culture built by one leader's daily habits can fade quickly when the habits stop. Working Together was not a poster on a wall. It was a meeting that happened every week, a chair at the table for the mechanic, an airline engineer allowed to say the design was wrong. When those practices ended, the results ended with them.
On Monday, look at who is missing from the room when your team makes decisions. If the people who will use, build, fix or pay for the work are not there, invite one of them in early, while change is still cheap. Then look at how bad news travels on your team. If people hide yellow and red until it is too late, the problem is not their honesty. It is what happens to them when they speak up.
Start one regular review where every person reports status in plain terms and where the first response to a red is a question, not a reprimand: what do you need, and who can help? Thank the person who raised it, out loud, in front of the team. Do it every week until people believe it. The 777 was trusted on its first day because hundreds of people had been allowed to tell the truth for years before it flew.