Puget Sound employee wins 'Name Your Plane' sweepstakes

For a guy who rarely enters a contest or buys a lottery ticket, Ross Coogan hit the jackpot last month. He was chosen as the lucky winner of the grand prize in the 7E7 "Name Your Plane" employee sweepstakes—a 737 simulator flight.

"I didn't think I would ever win," said Coogan, a 14-year Boeing employee and manager in the Commercial Airplanes Fabrication Division in Auburn, Wash.

He gives much of the credit to Debra Blum, the office administrator in Coogan's Large Machining Product Center organization. Blum sent an e-mail note to everyone in the group encouraging people to vote for a name, and included the link to the sweepstakes site.

Coogan entered twice and voted for "Dreamliner," which won the popular vote as the new name for the 7E7. His votes were among 500,000 worldwide, and they helped push "Dreamliner" past the initial frontrunner, "Global Cruiser," by a margin of only 2,500 votes.

"It evokes images of back when flying was glamorous and people wanted to fly because they thought it was exciting," Coogan said. "Hopefully we can make it exciting again. I look forward to flying in the 7E7."

Coogan said he plans to take his wife Pam and 12-year-old daughter Kelsea into the 737 flight simulator with him. In addition to the two-hour "flight," the grand-prize weekend includes two nights at a Marriott hotel, meals, a tour of the Everett, Wash., factory where the 747, 767 and 777 airplanes are built, and a tour of the Museum of Flight in Seattle. Boeing will provide transportation to and from Everett and the museum.

The "Name Your Plane" effort was a joint promotion by Boeing and AOL Time Warner Inc.

New ethics training 'out of this world'

Boeing is taking its ethics training to a new frontier in 2003 with a fresh, innovative approach designed to make the training more interesting and effective while increasing ethics awareness throughout the year.

The main focus of the 2003 Ethics Challenge is how the ethical decisions we make every day can affect both us personally and the company as a whole, said Gale Andrews, vice president for Ethics and Business Conduct. The 2003 Ethics Challenge also explores accountability in ethical decision making and underscores the need to act with integrity and operate in a culture of openness, Andrews said.

A culture of openness is one in which a group or work team practices open and honest communications, clearly articulates intentions and is transparent in its behavior—with no hidden agendas or personal rivalries. A culture of openness provides the foundation for nimble adaptation to changing circumstances and is a necessary state for high-performing teams, Andrews said.

The 2003 Ethics Challenge builds on a single story line that involve participants in an ethical decision-making dilemma aboard a hypothetical space station of the future. As the modules progress, they require difficult decisions complicated by business pressures, loyalties and friendships. Participants select a course of action and experience the consequences of each decision they make.

To keep ethics awareness high, the ethics training program has evolved into three 20-minute interactive segments held throughout the year, rather than the previous hour-long annual session.

The new training format will require more discussion and thought as participants proceed through a continuing scenario that may have no obvious right or wrong answers, Andrews said. It also challenges Boeing leaders and participants to discuss openly how they deal with ethical dilemmas.

As with past Boeing ethics training programs, the preferred method of delivery is a Web-based, manager-led group session. Individual online training is available for Boeing people who work at a remote location, are newly hired or were absent during group training.

Boeing released the first of the new training modules last month. The remaining two ethics training modules are scheduled for release in the third and fourth quarters of this year, respectively.

For more information on Boeing's Ethics programs and policies, and access to the 2003 Ethics Challenge, employees can check the company intranet at http://ethics.whq.boeing.com/

New book details history of Boeing

Timed with the centennial of powered flight, Boeing stores and publisher AGS BookWorks are releasing "The Story of The Boeing Company," the first complete, full-color coffee-table book chronicling the history of Boeing.

The book, written by aviation author Bill Yenne, contains many never-before-seen photographs.

"The Story of The Boeing Company" was produced and published by AGS Book-Works, a division of American Graphic Systems Inc., San Francisco, and is distributed exclusively by Boeing Stores Inc. The 11-by-11-inch, 288-page hardbound book contains more than 300 photographs and illustrations. The book retails for $45.00 and is available from the Boeing Store; visit the Web site at http://www.boeingstore.com for store locations or online ordering.