Boeing today announced it’s fourth-quarter results, a loss of $56 million, and plans to lay off a total of 10,000 employees. At the same time, they said the costs of the Machinists strike came to $1.2 billion in the quarter, and that engineering difficulty on the 747-8 program consumed another $685 million. Absent those two factors, the company would have had a profit of over $1.8 billion.

With the company sitting on a huge order backlog, with further delays of the Dreamliner program certain to lead to penalties and cancellations, coming off a quarter in which their inability to efficiently get enough work done cost a staggering amount of cash, their response is to cut the work force?

Boeing is a big company and there have always been some silly things on the fringes. It wasn’t called The Lazy B for no reason. But they used to do pretty well with basic logic. (They used to do a better job of figuring out how to build airplanes, too.) It seems Boeing is no longer an airplane manufacturer that makes money, it’s a financial empire that happens to make some airplanes. They’ve lost the fire in their bellies to make great products in staggering quantities and replaced it with a great love of counting beans.

Full disclosure: We spent six months working in Finance at corporate headquarters (the 2-25 Building on Marginal Way, Seattle) almost twenty years ago, making presentation graphics for cost accountants. The idea was to clearly identify the which activities cost money and which made money, a function that apparently is no longer present.

They’ve taken their eyes off the ball, and the communities where Boeing does business will pay dearly for it. Which we predicted when they moved headquarters to Chicago; by the time the real pain comes, all the executives will have moved to the Windy City where they won’t have to see anything but the numbers on their reports.