[arrakeenrevived]

Boeing moved their HQ to Chicago in 2001, and experienced wildly successful growth from 2001 until 2019. Seems like it might be recency bias to correlate Boeing decline with its HQ location.

Exxon is another example I can think of. Until recently, their HQ was in a tiny building in Irving, TX while the majority of their workforce was elsewhere.

There's also a whole slew of companies that have a lot of employees "in the field" that are separate from their corporate workforce and would inherently be HQed in locations other than where their large employee bases are, eg manufacturing companies, Intel, car manufacturers, Walmart, UPS, several airlines, banks... Even Boeing would fall into this category. I'm not sure how those factor into things.

[loudmax]

Aircraft design and build has a very long lead time. It's plausible that Boeing success in the early 2000's was the result of sound decisions and long-term planning that were made early on. The emphasis on immediate shareholder returns you get from squeezing R&D or QA would take a long time to manifest itself in the actual product.

[dan_quixote]

It's worth noting that the product and sales cycle for commercial aviation is measured in many years. And...2001/2002 was quite a bad time for commercial aviation as well.