04/14/2020
One Year Ago...
The Sunday “Outlook” section of the Daily Oklahoman featured a story on Nancy Riccitelli Anderson - pages T2 and T3...
Boeing's top executive in Oklahoma City works to include diverse workforce through inclusion
byJACK MONEY
Published:Sun, April 14, 2019 5:00 AM
The Daily Oklahoman
With the right talent, skills and a little bit of help, you can climb your way to the heavens.
Nancy R. Anderson, Boeing’s vice president of Aircraft Modernization & Modification, knows from experience.
Anderson recently returned to Oklahoma City to take the firm’s top executive post in town after starting her career with Boeing here 22 years ago.
Her career has followed a rocketing trajectory. Anderson went from joining Boeing as an engineer who worked on programming to support B-1 bombers to becoming the chief engineer of the program in Oklahoma City.
From there, she moved into the firm’s logistical business, where she learned how to manage programs, their people and budgets. Subsequently, Anderson took on lead engineering roles involving other Boeing programs supporting F/A-18 and F-15 aircraft and all of Boeing’s weapons programs, plus worked for a time as the company’s chief engineer for military development programs.
Anderson also spent time at Boeing’s facilities in Everett, Washington, where she worked as its executive program manager on a job to upgrade its commercial factories to build the 777 and 777X air frames.
Then, she became Boeing’s executive program director for its Airborne Surveillance Command and Control program, which includes airborne warning and control programs for Australia, Turkey and Korea, as well as the Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) fleets of the United States, NATO, the United Kingdom, France, Saudi Arabia and Japan.
Most recently, Anderson served Boeing as deputy program manager for Boeing’s Commercial Crew Program in Florida, which is building the Commercial Crew Transportation System (CCTS) known as the CST-100 Starliner.
In that role, she managed Boeing’s development of a human-rated spacecraft that can transport NASA astronauts to and from the International Space Station, and eventually, paying passengers to a variety of low-Earth orbit destinations. The project is about to begin test flights, something Anderson and all of Boeing’s other employees will be watching closely and cheering on.
All of that and more, Anderson said, started with her love of calculus, guidance from Sister Esther, a seventh-grade science teacher who pushed her into mastering science, and the loving support of her maternal grandmother, parents, sisters and friends.
But luck didn’t hurt, she would quickly add.
“I tell people I lucked into some of my positions from my first job out of college … where I just happened to get into the interface group that introduced me to folks from Boeing, Rockwell and other firms,” Anderson said.
“But, never in a million years would I have dreamed I would be a vice president at The Boeing Co., leading this type of business.”
The company had a much smaller profile in Oklahoma City when Anderson and her husband, a retired Air Force navigator who flew on B-1 bombers, moved here to both work for Boeing.
Back then, Boeing employed perhaps a few hundred people who worked primarily on Tinker Air Force Base with its military partners. Boeing also operated a modest logistics center in an adjacent industrial park.
Anderson, who had earned a Bachelor of Science degree in statistics and applied math and later earned a master’s degree in information management, said her initial Boeing work in Oklahoma City was technical in nature until she made the move into logistics.
“And that opened up the whole Boeing world to me, connecting me with St. Louis and all of our different businesses,” she said.
After that, Anderson said she often worked in other locations such as St. Louis, Philadelphia, the Seattle area and Florida for years at a time, though she and her husband kept their Oklahoma City-area home.
When she returned to Oklahoma City in 2015 to lead the company’s airborne surveillance command and control programs, she thought she was back home for good.
But then, she was offered the chance to work on Boeing’s Starliner project.
“I thought, ‘Oh gosh, who wouldn’t want to work on a space program?’
“So, I’ve made a big circle,” she said. “I started my career here, and now I’m back to lead the whole operation.”
Boeing’s aircraft modernization and modification division is a significant part of its business in 2019. As the program’s top executive, Anderson said she leads “an incredibly talented group” of more than 3,000 employees, the majority of which now work in Oklahoma City.
The division is active in three primary areas.
• It supports modification and modernization work ongoing with Boeing’s B-1 and B-52 bombers, as well as Northrop’s B-2 bomber.
• It also does modifications and modernizations to aircraft it sells to the United States and other governments. Domestically, these modified aircraft are used to transport top government officials, such as the president.
While most of the modification work on those aircraft is done in San Antonio, related engineering and software work needed to support those improvements is done in Oklahoma City.
• Finally, the division supports the various aircraft that Boeing builds for the U.S., allies and other governments that are used as part of airborne surveillance command and control systems.
Today, Boeing’s campus consists of three large buildings on the southwest side of the base, near the former General Motors plant. It hired nearly 600 additional people in 2018, alone.
Boeing not only has grown the past 22 years. It also has become significantly more diverse.
“In my career coming up, from school up through a certain point, you could sometimes look around and see you were the only one that looked like you in the room,” Anderson said.
“But Boeing really has done a lot to change that,” she said, noting the company’s management structure is transforming from what used to be homogenously white and male to a much more diverse organization.
“We are not exactly where we want to be,” Anderson admitted, “but we are trying to do that on every level. And when you look at our workforce here, we are getting a lot better. As we have been hiring, it has given us an opportunity to build diversity.”
To that end, Boeing has created numerous associations to support the diverse populations it employs, including one for Asians, one for Native Americans, one for African-Americans, one for le***an, bisexual, gay and transgender Americans, one for Hispanic Americans, one for veterans and one for its women in leadership.
It also created a generation to generation support group, giving baby boomers and millennials the opportunity to interrelate and reach some common understandings.
Anderson said Boeing also is working to be sure it is taking full advantage of its diverse workforce by making sure it belongs to an inclusive community.
It does so through expecting its employees to follow a code of behavior that asks them to be inclusive and respectful of their co-workers and customers.
“Diversity is one thing, when you are looking at ethnicities, genders and folks from different places,” she said. “But what we are doing must go further. We need to be sure and include them so that they can look and say, ‘I can do that type of job.’ We want to encourage them that is possible.”
Anderson said that she obviously feels strongly about getting girls interested in science, technology, engineering and math programs.
“But we want everyone to realize that they, too, could be in this position, and that is the message we want to get out,” she said.
“I didn’t have those types of role models along the way,” Anderson said. “It is my passion now to give back to those who maybe didn’t have the same types of mentors I did when I was growing up. I am always allowing people in, even if it is just through one short meeting, to encourage them that they, too, can be a leader.”
