Since the age of about six, when I realized that being a doctor meant dealing with blood, I have looked to the sky for my inspiration and excitement.
My first connection with aviation, growing up in San Jose, Costa Rica, was with a mining engineer that my mother worked for. He used a Piper Pacer four-seat, fabric-covered aircraft as his transportation to the gold mines where he "prospected." The combination of the excitement of flying and the utility of airplanes as a transportation system cinched my career goals, and they never wavered.
In high school at Worcester Academy I became known as "Morton Airlines," the builder and flyer of many control-line gasoline-powered model airplanes. The scent of glue and airplane "dope" in my room, and the rather frequent catastrophes in the Morton Airlines fleet, were grist for the school newspaper. I learned aerodynamics and explored the criticality of proper placement of the center of gravity the hard way.
Earning the Rensselaer Medal helped decide the next step, and in September of 1954 I joined over a thousand freshmen for RPI orientation. In those days, engineering education was something like "running the gauntlet." There was a high attrition rate among freshmen—the educational approach was militaristic and the first two years were rather disconnected from the students’ majors.
I give you all this history because, for some of us, our career is a destiny that is clear from an early age. This focus is a tremendous asset during your university tenure, because it provides a beacon in selection of courses, interaction with peers, and relationships with professors. If you are one of those lucky people whose career has chosen you, you have but to follow your star and commit to total immersion in the arcana of the particular profession that draws you. Such was my great good fortune.
Of course, the university is only the beginning, and my selection of Boeing for a career platform was governed as much by chance as by intent. Since I was fluent in Spanish, Boeing recruited me to teach aerodynamics and airplane systems to pilots of airlines transitioning to the first transport jet airplane—the 707.
This illustrates that it is difficult to predict how your ancillary talents will enhance your educational and career experience. The fact that I was an engineer and a pilot and spoke Spanish put me in airplane operation and customer-centered occupations at Boeing. It resulted in good career progression, but also in amazingly interesting assignments.
From training pilots, my opportunities progressed through an unlikely series, starting out developing operational and certification manuals for customers, and winding up a vice president of human resources. I did marketing and sales, but also worked on flight deck design and project management. I can count seven separate "careers" (and one pension plan!) in my tenure at Boeing—perhaps an unusual state of affairs for the future but not uncommon among my peers.
Career planning is a fascinating subject. Excessive focus misses peripheral opportunities. Inadequate attention to career recruitment may cause sidetracks not in harmony with your goals. Luck plays a significant part—in a 40-year span, both bad luck and good fortune can appear a number of times.
The single most important attribute that has governed my experience is that ineffable quality called "attitude." So my rule of thumb in career planning is to pay attention to the abstractions that manifest a positive attitude:
Concentrate more than 90 percent of your attention on the matter at hand and the problem(s) to be solved.
Dedicate less than 10 percent of your attention to who gets the credit or personal politics.
Understand the unstated but vital issues surrounding how assigned people work together. Learn to work within the politics that exist, and to change them for the better.
Develop and apply your best communications skills, both written and oral.
Learn to live comfortably with a certain amount of ambiguity.
If you are a generalist, learn to communicate with and across the specialties.
If you are a specialist, learn to understand the context in which your contribution will apply.
I retired six months ago after 42 years at Boeing. I am now applying what I learned to projects involving flying, education, leadership development, and flight deck design in general aviation. I do volunteer work and I study jazz piano. One project (on behalf of an aviation university) is to envision what aviation education will be like for students graduating in 2020.
So it is "back to the future" for me, as most things I did or learned during my career seem to apply one way or another to this new phase of my life. With great sincerity, I wish you the excitement and fulfillment in your education and career that has been mine to enjoy.
Editor’s Note: Peter Morton ’58 is a retired vice president of Boeing Company in Seattle, Wash. Write him at peterandmarie@earthlink.net.
