Success Quote by Phil Condit

Management-speak rarely admits what it is: a moral argument dressed up as arithmetic. Phil Condit’s line is pure shareholder-era clarity, the kind that sounds clinical until you notice the implied violence. “Fixing or eliminating” is a euphemism that lets layoffs, divestitures, plant closures, and cultural upheaval travel under the respectable banner of “value.” The sentence is engineered to make hard calls feel inevitable, even benevolent: we are not cutting people or abandoning communities; we are removing “operations that lessen value,” as if value were an objective force of nature instead of a choice about who benefits.

The rhetoric is also a team-building charm offensive. “Our entire team” signals discipline and unanimity, preempting internal dissent by turning strategy into a shared mission. No mention of customers, workers, safety, or public trust appears because the real audience is capital: analysts, investors, and boards who want to hear that management will treat the company like a portfolio, not a civic institution.

In Condit’s era - the 1990s corporate boom and the consolidation-heavy aerospace world - “managing for value” was a managerial religion. Boeing, in particular, was navigating the tension between engineering culture and finance-driven performance expectations. Read with that backdrop, the quote isn’t just operational guidance; it’s a declaration of what counts. If something can’t justify itself in the language of value creation, it forfeits its right to exist. That’s the power of the line: it turns a contested worldview into a simple, executable checklist.