It was a rainy weekend and I stayed home to catch up on some Netflix shows. I came across this documentary Downfall: The Case Against Boeing.
It began with how Boeing airlines have won the hearts of many in the past so much so that there is a slogan, “If it’s not Boeing, I’m not going.” Things then change as corporate greed takes over and covers how the two crashes, the Lion and the Ethiopian 737 Maxes happen as a result of that. It began to be scary to think that the very essence of a corporation is just to simply deliver shareholder value. When the compensation of the CEO is not aligned to the other stakeholders, things get thrown out of the window. You can’t tell someone what to do when their pockets depend on what they can try not to do and get away with it.
For some investors, Boeing was probably one of their best positions in the years leading to 2018. But how many of them really knows what goes on behind some of the companies that we have been investing in for years. As investors we only see the numbers on the financial statements but we do not know at what costs were those numbers derived.
This has really got me thinking and wondering, which other stories of the same narrative are continuing in other companies. Perhaps this is why ESG investing which focuses on longer term outcomes while running the core business well is getting popular.