Boeing’s new CFO sees ‘performance culture’ driving a return to positive cash flow next year

Good morning. As a new hire, you never truly know a company’s culture until you experience it firsthand. For Boeing CFO Jay Malave, it has been a little over three months—and he is ready to offer an evaluation.

After a series of aircraft malfunctions, management challenges, and a strike by more than 33,000 machinists in 2024, Boeing has seen significant changes in its executive leadership over the past year. Malave began his tenure as EVP and CFO on Aug. 15, succeeding Brian West, who served as finance chief for four years. Kelly Ortberg became Boeing’s president and CEO in August 2024.

Speaking Tuesday at the UBS Global Industrials and Transportation Conference, Malave said that, by the time he joined the company, he was already benefiting from culture changes Ortberg had put in motion.

“What I’ve seen is a really engaged workforce, a very strong management team—one that has a can-do attitude,” Malave said. Management is focused on improvement and making Boeing better every day, he said. “To me, that is incredibly important, because that’s a sign of a performance culture, and that’s one of the things you look for when you join a company,” Malave said. “You can never really tell from the outside looking in what it’s actually like working in the company.”

He described “active management” as a leadership team that is “willing to roll up its sleeves, get its hands dirty, help solve problems, and be part of the solutions—and that’s exactly what I see here at Boeing,” he said. “I’m that type of person who likes to get into the details, to focus on how we solve a problem rather than just observing it. From my perspective, I’ve been able to transition pretty easily into an environment like that.”

At Boeing (No. 63 on the Fortune 500), Malave leads the finance organization, as well as strategy, business planning, global real estate, and he serves on the company’s executive council. He was most recently CFO of Lockheed Martin and previously held senior finance roles at L3Harris Technologies. He also spent more than 20 years at United Technologies (UTC), including serving as CFO of Carrier Corporation when it was a UTC division.

Boeing’s path back to positive cash flow

During the conversation, Malave also sketched out a financial reset for Boeing. He expects the company to move back into positive free cash flow in 2026 in the low single-digit billions. This is dependent upon ramping up production of the 737 Max and 787 Dreamliner and working through its stockpile of undelivered jets.

Malave described next year as the start of rebuilding toward Boeing’s long-standing $10 billion annual cash-generation target, with higher production rates as key toward that ambition. The outlook marks a sharp improvement from roughly $2 billion in expected free cash outflow in 2025, and his comments helped lift Boeing shares by nearly 10% on Tuesday.

Risk, opportunity—and no ‘grenades’ for BDS

In July, Boeing veteran Stephen Parker was appointed president and CEO of its Defense, Space & Security (BDS) business, after serving as interim leader since September 2024. Malave is temporarily separated from BDS because of his recent role at Lockheed Martin, and Boeing has formally agreed he will not take part in BDS activities until the end of the year to avoid potential conflicts of interest with his former employer.

Malave stressed that he does not plan to disrupt the BDS portfolio once he is able to engage there. “I think there’s been some investor angst in terms of, once Jay Malave gets access to the BDS program, there’s going to be a bunch of grenades that go off on all these programs,” he said. “I’m there to learn.” He added, “In any program, there’s going to be risk, there’s going to be opportunities. My job will be: How can I help them mitigate risk, and how can I help them realize opportunities? I’m not going in there with a mandate or an agenda to throw grenades at different programs.”

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Leaderboard

Michele Allen was appointed CFO of Jersey Mike’s Subs, a franchisor of fast-casual sandwich shops, effective Dec. 1. Allen succeeds Walter Tombs, who is retiring from Jersey Mike’s in January after 26 years with the company. Allen brings more than 25 years of financial leadership experience. Most recently, she served as CFO and head of strategy at Wyndham Hotels & Resorts. Allen began her career with Deloitte as an auditor.

Jessica Ross was appointed CFO of GitLab Inc. (Nasdaq: GTLB), a DevSecOps platform, effective Jan. 15. Ross joins the company from Frontdoor, where she served as CFO. She has more than 25 years of experience in finance, accounting, and operational leadership at companies like Salesforce and Stitch Fix, and spent 12 years in public accounting at Arthur Andersen and Deloitte.

Big Deal

Adobe has released online shopping data for the 2025 holiday season covering Cyber Week, the five-day shopping period from Thanksgiving through Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Consumers spent a total of $14.25 billion online on Cyber Monday, up 7.1% year over year and above Adobe’s initial projection of $14.2 billion (up 6.3% year over year). During the peak hours of 8 to 10 p.m., consumers spent $16 million every minute, according to Adobe.

Usage of the buy now, pay later payment method hit an all-time high on Cyber Monday, driving $1.03 billion in online spend (up 4.2% year over year), according to the data. Adobe also found that on Cyber Monday, AI-driven traffic to U.S. retail sites (measured by shoppers clicking on a link) increased by 670% compared with last year.

Courtesy of Adobe

Going deeper

“Anthropic is all in on ‘AI safety’—and that’s helping the $183 billion startup win over big business” is a new Fortunefeature by Jeremy Kahn.

Kahn writes: “Anthropic has emerged as one of the leading rivals to OpenAI and Google in the race to build ever-more-capable artificial intelligence. And while Anthropic and its Claude family of AI models don’t have quite the same brand recognition as crosstown rival OpenAI and its ChatGPT products, over the past year Claude has quietly emerged as the model that businesses seem to like best. Anthropic, currently valued at $183 billion, has by some metrics pulled ahead of its larger rivals, OpenAI and Google, in enterprise usage.” You can read the complete article here.