Boeing is a failure of capitalism
When profit and growth are top priorities, other values fall away…
Below are stories I wrote about Boeing in 2019 and 2020 after two Boeing jets went down within months of each other, killing 346 people. Note the dates of each story. The recent loss of a door off a Boeing plane in flight represents more of the same failure of “culture” at a company that long ago lost the right to claim “Safety is job 1.” This article is chilling, and explains what happened at Boeing that made the recent near tragedy inevitable.
Did Boeing hide a problem?
By Erik Dolson
March 19, 2019
How is it that communist China moved more quickly to protect their flying public by grounding the Boeing 737 Max than the Federal Aviation Administration moved to protect Americans? Why did the FAA wait until world condemnation drowned out their excuses?
It could not be because Boeing has the second largest lobbying budget in America, after AT&T, right? I mean, no company would put profit ahead of safety, right? Not here in America, where the free market all but guarantees that each and every company puts the welfare of customers over the bottom line, every time.
Like drug makers. Or insurance companies. Or Goldman Sachs. Monsanto. Though they might be tempted, they just wouldn’t.
But … Boeing? Boeing wouldn’t even be tempted, even after their move out of Seattle to Chicago.
Even as Republicans are ever more successful at dismantling agencies that protect Americans from corporate greed, there are limits to what those companies would allow, right? Lead in drinking water? If you can’t taste it, you can ignore it. Pesticides and herbicides causing cancer? Wear thicker socks. Lethal paint strippers sold in Home Depot? Hold your breath during application. Air pollution? Lower standards because Big Oil profits are threatened by electric cars!
Boeing 737s falling out of the air? We’ll wait for more information, the accidents look similar but may not be, pilots had concerns some time ago and we at Boeing were listening and apologizing! We were also making LOTS of MONEY but you need to believe us when we tell you that Safety is Our Number One Concern!
There was a time when heads of Japanese companies would commit suicide over disgracing their company and nation for acts similar to this. There was a sense of honor, and consequently, a belief in dishonor. Had Boeing done the honorable thing and immediately and voluntarily grounded its own fleet and admitted it failed to adequately inform and then train pilots in new systems, and possibly had a design flaw in their money making work horse, I’d applaud the company and government oversight.
But Boeing didn’t do that, and neither did the FAA. There was so much mistrust that the watchdog had been captured by the wolf that Ethiopia, site of the second crash (just a “shithole” country according to the man standing on the desk in the oval office and sending out scream-tweets), would not send the plane’s data recorders to the U.S. for analysis, but opted for France (home of Airbus) instead. We are definitely Making America Great Again.
Who at Boeing is responsible for decisions that led to the deaths of over 300 people in two aircraft accidents? Which executive made the call on limited training, on silence, on pretending that a software kludge made up for bad engine placement? Which engineer raised his or her hand and said, “This is not right.” We need names.
What communication occurred between Boeing and the FAA after each accident? What internal communications occurred within Boeing? Who wrote what to whom? It’s time for subpoenas. It’s long past time that we held individuals responsible for corporate malfeasance, and stopped slapping a corporate wrist. We need names.
There are executives at Wells Fargo who still have jobs, long after “new accounts managers” were fired for not foisting enough fake services on unsuspecting bank customers. We never got names.
But … Boeing?
If this is as bad as it seems, without parsing words or the utterance of greasy little excuses, it will be time for heads to roll, time for some executives to fall on their swords.
Boeing may be screwed
By Erik Dolson
September 28, 2019
Airplane manufacturer Boeing announced earlier this month that a safety committee had been formed on the board of directors after two crashes of the company’s 737 Max aircraft took 346 lives.
A safety committee! On the board! Thank god. Shareholders and passengers alike can fly much relieved.
I’d like to add a couple of other suggestions, distilled after talking to current and former Boeing employees over the last few months.
First, fire CEO and board chair Dennis Mullenburg. These tragedies occurred on his watch, and he lost all credibility while repeating the demonstrably false “safety is our top priority.” The crash of two 737 Max planes due to faulty software, faulty systems, and faulty processes made that claim absurd. Mullenburg is partly responsible for the aggressive focus on profit that led to these tragedies.
Boeing exists to make a profit. Safety is central to that goal, but not the primary. Ask any employee who answers to a Boeing manager who himself or herself is under intense pressure to reduce costs on a regular basis.
The 737 Max was a bit of a kludge in the first place, an end run around regulations that would have required a completely new certification if Boeing had fielded an entirely new design. Recertification would have been expensive and caused delays, adding even more expense. So, Boeing told regulators and customers essentially that the 737 Max was “the plane you know and love, only better!”
But the company had installed new engines on the plane, and placed them farther forward. The engine pods cause lift when the nose of the plane is pointed up. The new location resulted in forces that pushed the nose up even further. This “divergent condition” can eventually cause a stall, and the airplane to fall out of the air.
Normally, a divergent condition is not allowed in passenger aircraft, which are supposed to return to a stable position if no forces are applied to the pilot’s controls. So Boeing came up with software that pushes the nose down when sensors indicate a stall is imminent.
It appears a sensor malfunctioned in the two planes that crashed. The airplane “thought” it was nearing a stall, and pushed the nose down. Pilots repeatedly tried to pull the nose up, but the planes were stronger and persisted, until they flew into the ground.
The central questions here are why didn’t Boeing catch this problem before people died, and can it be fixed?
I suggest that Boeing didn’t catch the problem because of the “culture” within the company. The end run around certification set the ball in motion. Constant pressure to cut costs and speed up development added momentum. So did the policy of not requiring and then informing airlines that pilots would need more training on the new systems.
These decisions were not the result of “safety is our number one priority.”
Can the planes be fixed? Certainly more sensors can be added (ONE!? Boeing allowed planes out the door with a single critical sensor!? There should have been three!). The software is being modified to give pilots more control.
The FAA in the United States may allow the 737 Max to fly again soon. After all, Boeing has a huge lobbying force in Washington D.C. Money matters.
However, transportation safety agencies in other countries may require that the plane not have a divergent condition at all, and/or that pilots be able to recover the plane from any flight situation with the software completely inoperable. Can the 737 Max do that?
Can the 737 Max recover from a near stall with the current engine design without software assistance? Can Boeing recover if only the FAA certifies the plane and it can’t fly in other countries? Would anyone fly on the plane?
The problems for the 737 Max go deeper than a software glitch, and the troubles at Boeing will not be fixed by adding a safety committee to the board of directors. At some point, the plane and the company may require a more significant change in design.
If not, I suggest that the entire Boeing board of directors and top management be on the plane as it goes through the more extreme flight tests. Then shareholders and passengers alike would be assured that the planes are as safe as they can be.
Did Boeing eliminate sensor for profit?
By Erik Dolson
October 4, 2019
Last week it was reported that versions of the MCAS software on planes sold by Boeing to the military were required to have three angle of attack sensors installed. Planes sold by Boeing’s competitor, Airbus, also have three angle of attack sensors. Three sensors are designed to compensate if one should be damaged.
Two civilian Boeing planes that crashed earlier this year, killing 346 people, had only one angle of attack sensor with similar software. It is believed that faulty sensors indicated the planes were approaching a nose up stall, and triggered software that flew the planes into the ground.
Why did Boeing sell planes with only one sensor, when most experts say that “critical systems” need redundancy, and the airplane maker was clearly aware of this issue from their experience with the military?
One possible explanation is that Boeing expected customers to order the planes with the additional sensors as “options.” This strategy, employed often by automobile manufacturers, allows a car, for example, to be advertised at a low price and then be sold at a higher price if options are selected, and the options themselves can be sold at a higher margin.
According to the New York Times, options can add millions of dollars to the price of a plane.
So, a question to be asked is whether Boeing deleted one or two of the angle of attack sensors with the expectation of adding them back to planes at customer request and at a greater profit, or “gaming” the sales process.
If so, a follow-up question is where in the development process of the civilian 737 Maxx was that decision made, who made that decision, and who signed off on it.
Because it is hard to imagine engineers in a company that claims that “safety is our top priority” would have signed off on such an obvious problem.
Boeing is still hiding something
By Erik Dolson
December 23, 2019
I’d been working on a blog saying that Boeing chief Dennis Muilenburg had to go. Boeing beat me to it. Meulenberg was let go over the weekend before I could publish.
Muilenburg was clumsy through the crisis following the crash of two of its new 737 Max airplanes that killed 346 people. He applied political pressure and embarrassed the Federal Aviation Administration, which delayed grounding the airliner until many other nations had already done so. He repeated “Safety is our number one priority” long after that was obviously untrue. He failed to effectively communicate with his customers, the major airlines.
But it’s now critical for Boeing to accept that the tragedies resulted from deeper issues within the company that predate Muilenburg’s fraught leadership. Boeing has a cultural problem that has been stewing for decades.
This is not a secret. Conversations with current and former Boeing employees uncover a uniform thread that runs all the way to the 737 Max: Boeing’s culture veered from making the best airliners in the world to profit and growth for its own sake.
It will not be easy nor quick for Boeing to recover. Huge damage has been done, not only to the reputation of the company but to internal resources. Good people whose primary goal was quality have been lost. Systems that provided feedback loops for safety have atrophied. Trust, within the company and in the company by customers around the world, has been squandered. It will take years, if not decades, to rebuild.
Boeing has been in denial about this cultural problem. Like an alcoholic who has been successful in business for years, Boeing has relied on presentation and powerful friends to hide core weakness. But Boeing lives in a world defined by physics. Boeing’s attempt to fool the world has become unmanageable.
There’s a recipe for recovery that’s strangely appropriate. To paraphrase: “…Those who do not recover … are constitutionally incapable of grasping and developing … rigorous honesty… be fearless and thorough from the very start.”
The 737 Max crisis reeks from lack of honesty. Boeing tried to pass a new engine configuration off as having the same characteristics as older 737s currently flying; said no additional pilot training was required; blamed pilots of the crashed planes; presented a fatuous power point to the FAA instead of a book of actual software changes. Boeing has been trying to buy time.
Boeing is still hiding something, despite Muilenburg’s “resignation.” If I had to guess, it’s the divergent flight characteristics caused by relocating the planes new engines further forward on the wing. Simply stated, a passenger plane is supposed to “converge” to straight and level flight at a certain throttle configuration.
With “divergent “characteristics,” an abnormal situation will get worse, or “diverge” from straight and level, because of the abnormal condition. The new engine location causes the nose of the airplane to pitch up further when it’s already too high.
In the case of the two crashed airliners, a single (!) faulty sensor may have triggered an automated response in software designed to compensate for the divergent condition, and to make the plane seem to fly like older 737’s without the new engines. The software pushed the nose down, and the planes flew into the ground.
This may not be curable by software changes. Some regulators elsewhere in the world, and maybe even the FAA now that it seems to have found some spine when it comes to Boeing, may not approve a plane that has divergent flight characteristics. Airlines that purchased the plane may want their money back.
This could break the company.
Boeing may recover, but can no longer exist in denial. It will be fascinating to watch how the company deals with the crisis moving forward.
Boeing may need a hug
by Erik Dolson
December 25, 2019
Boeing has released information to airlines on how to convince customers and crew that the 737 Max planes are “safe” after two crashed, killing 346 people. One point made was that passengers are more emotional than rational:
Perhaps Boeing should focus on fixing the planes and telling the truth, rather than manipulating emotions.
Most aircraft fly in a “balance” of forces acting on wings and tail that rotate the plane around the “center of lift.” At any given speed through the air, wings push up with a certain force, and the tail pushes with a different force. Change the speed of air over wings and the balance will change, the plane will rotate up or down, finding a new equilibrium.
If the nose rises too far and the angle of the wing to the air flow (angle of attack) is too great, the wing will stop flying. This is called a “stall.” Usually, the main wing will stall before the tail, which will cause the nose to drop, the angle of attack to improve, airspeed to increase, and the wing (and plane) plane can start flying again.
Boeing put new engines on the 737 Max, but had to move them forward on the wing. Engine pods have their own lift. Being farther forward, there was more of a “lever arm” of lift from the engines, and this changed the balance between wing and tail, especially at high angles of attack.
It’s possible that the new configuration allowed the main wing to have more lift and not stall before the tail. If the main wing does not stall before the tail, neither wing nor tail can provide control. The airplane could fall out of the sky.
Or, it’s possible that at a certain angle of attack, lift from the engine pods might overwhelm the control of the tail surfaces, causing the nose to suddenly flip up.
In designing the plane, one solution would have been to change the wing. But a new wing would have required new certification, higher costs and delay. So Boeing installed the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) software that prevented the plane from approaching extremely high angles of attack.
In most planes, including the older 737s, if a plane’s nose drops one of the first things a pilot will do is pull back on controls to bring the nose up and increase power to gain more lift from the main wing. This appears to have happened in the two tragedies.
But changes Boeing made to the behavior of the new planes were not highlighted, nor were recovery procedures if the software was misbehaving. In those situations, pilots had to turn off the new software before they could regain control of their airplane because the software pushing the nose down was stronger than pilots.
It appears pilots of the two doomed 737 Max planes did not know this because Boeing did not want airlines to have to retrain pilots to fly the new Max. This would have increased airline costs and made the new plane less competitive, so Boeing downplayed the impact of the software and did what they could to avoid calling attention to this new characteristic, both with their airline customers and the FAA.
Boeing also included a single angle-of-attack sensor as standard equipment on the 737 Max, despite being required by military buyers to install three sensors. Airbus planes also have three sensors. The reason for three is that if two sensors disagree, which one is right? Boeing said the pilots themselves would be the “redundant” system, unless airlines wanted to spend the money on an additional sensor. Add-ons were a profit center for the plane maker.
One has to think that if Boeing, one of the largest manufacturing companies in the world, could fix this issue with a software tweak that would have been done long ago, and 737 Max planes that were piling up before Boeing ended production a couple of weeks ago would be on their way to customers. Why hasn’t this happened?
One guess is that a software tweak won’t fix a fundamental problem with the plane and the placement of the new engines. Will it still fly if computer systems failed, the MACA system was not there to babysit, and the plane encountered a condition of extremely high angle of attack where lift of engine pods destabilized the plane to the point of loss of control?
Would a plane built to those specifications be allowed to fly passengers?
If not, remember that Boeing believes “a human connection will be more effective than rational appeals.” The company may need a hug.
(I welcome comments on this topic by professional pilots, especially test pilots and/or aeronautical engineers)
Boeing should go
By Erik Dolson
January 25, 2020
Boeing, maker of airplanes in America, employer of more than 100,000 Americans, major component of America’s economy and hero of America’s past wars, has become cancerous and should be cut out of the body of our capitalism.
For the good of America.
Boeing was once a company of engineers. It employed the best and the brightest who took ideas that were almost science fiction and built them into real, market-dominating airliners.
Like a healthy organ, Boeing did its job wonderfully well with a minimum of attention. Tucked up in the wet Pacific Northwest, Boeing dominated that part of Washington state not owned by Weyerhaeuser: the glacial plain from Boeing Field in the south to Everett in the north, and most of Seattle, long before the gestation of Microsoft and Amazon.
But in the 1980s, Boeing began to change. Focus shifted from building planes to growth. Originally intended to protect profit, growth became an end in itself, as did a focus in management on share price.
The hallmarks of cancer include continuous growth, limitless number of cell divisions, and invasion of tissue and formation of metastases. Boeing began to fit this description.
As with many cancers, there was an environmental component. The 1980s included a seismic shift in the concept of “success” in corporate America, epitomized by the genius of General Electric’s leader, “Neutron” Jack Welch. Neutron bombs kill people but leave buildings. Welch got his nickname by firing employees but keeping businesses, lowering cost and increasing profits.
One of Welch’s tools was “Six Sigma,” a data driven system to improve efficiency. He also had a policy of firing the bottom 10 percent of sales producers every year, regardless of their absolute performance. Stock price became a primary focus. At first Welch’s methods were successful. G.E. value skyrocketed as Welch bought and sold divisions, looking for maximum return.
Welch wanted G.E. to be the largest company in the world. Men who worked for him were sought by other companies hoping for some of the G.E. magic. This was also during a time of overall increase in stock valuations, but Welch’s G.E. and others outperformed indexes such as the S&P 500.
Welch also distributed stock to his management teams, took a good chunk himself. G.E. grew rapidly, gains in stock price became a primary measure of success, and Welch was regarded as a hero of capitalism. (It didn’t always work. Even G.E.’s stock lost half its value after Welch retired, and many of the companies that adopted his ideas did not fare much better.)
But other companies took note, including Boeing, in the 90s under the leadership of Phil Condit. Condit expanded Boeing, bought rivals such as McDonald Douglas, Rockwell Aerospace and Hughes Space & Communications, expanded operations to North Carolina and South Carolina (possibly to get away from the unions in the Pacific Northwest).
Condit doubled the size of the company and eventually moved Boeing headquarters out of its Seattle birthplace to Chicago in 2001. Boeing grew, it was profitable, but the cancer had metastasized. The company was showing early signs of disease as focus shifted away from building the best airplanes in the world to becoming one of the most valuable companies in the world.
Harry Stonecipher succeeded Condit in 2003 after it was disclosed that Boeing had been in discussions to hire an Air Force officer who was in charge of procurement of Boeing planes. One got the sense that values were open to question.
Stonecipher had worked for G.E. under Jack Welch prior to heading up McDonnell Douglas, until Boeing bought that company. At Boeing, Stonecipher was proud of the fact that he was blowing up the engineering culture at Boeing so that it would be run “like a business rather than like a great engineering firm.” (JOE NOCERA, Bloomberg) Stock price rose.
Two years later, Stonecipher was replaced by James McNerney, yet another G.E. man. McNerney had no experience in aviation. But he too was an avid cost cutter, and it was under his watch that the decision was made to “upgrade” the 737 series to a 737 MAX instead of developing a new model.
It’s important to realize that this was gaming the system. A new model would have required a full review by the FAA and other regulatory agencies. More training would be required of pilots, etc. This would slow down approval and make the plane more expensive.
In a hurry, management was more interested in driving down labor cost, outsourcing work to the cheapest subcontractor, reducing staff, and misleading the Federal Aviation Administration. Presentation of the 737 Max plane as “just another 737” was critical to its planned success, and necessary to jack up the stock price. Money saved would be used for stock buybacks, executive compensation, and growth.
Internal communication was fraying, because what employee wanted to bring problems to a manager who was trying to eliminate his/her job?
McNerney was succeeded by Dennis Muilenburg. While Muilenburg was an engineer by training and a long time Boeing employee, at this point the Boeing mindset was squarely focused on profit and share price. No one at the top seemed to be aware of, or willing to consider, what was happening on the shop floors, in the warehouses. In fact, one of the goals of the move to Chicago was to isolate management from day-to-day concerns.
So, 40 years after it began, the cancer finally resulted in catastrophe when 346 people in two Boeing aircraft died when the planes flew into the ground due to flaws in software design, possibly hardware problems, and a lack of pilot training, all of which were the result of Boeing’s focus on profit and cost cutting rather than engineering.
The company’s internal failures were exposed in 2019, but they’ve been obvious to thousands who worked for Boeing for years. Employees were not reluctant to share their opinions that the company had been floundering, but were unheeded. 2019 was simply when the disease at Boeing became known to the world. When Muilenberg told Congress after the two Max crashes that “safety is in our DNA” at Boeing, he was describing a company that had not existed for years, if not decades.
The crisis of the 737 Max is not the only example. Boeing is failing to meet military requirements for new refueling tankers, faces a lukewarm reception for its revolutionary 787 plane that was years late, and recently had an embarrassing failure when its space division shuttle failed to rendezvous with the space station.
Muilenburg was fired a month ago on December 23, 2019, but he was replaced by yet another G.E. alumnus, David Calhoun, who had worked for G.E. for 26 years and also had no background in building airplanes beyond being a director of Boeing during the time when the problems festered.
So, what’s to be done? Many will say that Boeing is too big to fail, that the impact to America and to the communities Boeing supported for generations is simply too great. But there’s another way to look at this.
The social and economic community of America is a very strong organism; diverse, vibrant, and resistant to many ailments. It often demonstrates the success of capitalism, a paradigm of production and distribution that has vastly improved the human condition.
Capitalism also heralds its accomplishments through “creative destruction.” Perhaps an American icon needs to be destroyed by the very forces that led to its dominance. Perhaps Boeing should fail so that American capitalism itself can improve and become healthy.
A healthy body sloughs defective cells so that good cells can flourish. It is when this process stops that cancer spreads and bodies die.
Corporate leaders often stress “consequences” for the less fortunate. Consequences for mismanagement are equally appropriate.
Stockholders should lose their equity. Stockholder risk will sharpen oversight. Only then can there be a return to responsibility.
Boeing should be parted out. Whatever value is reclaimed should protect hundreds of thousands of Boeing workers, pensioners, subcontractors, and customers. Subsidiaries like the military division and the space division should be broken off and sold. Money raised should be used to make reparations.
There has been an impact on subcontractors, and their employees. Communities have been harmed, and this is likely to continue. They should be revitalized.
Businesses have been disrupted. Southwest Airline built its business model around the 737, and purchased new 737 Max planes that will have been grounded for over a year. Southwest and other airlines have been harmed. They should be compensated.
Executives and board members who were complicit in the destruction of Boeing and the loss of lives should be held accountable. Money made from their dereliction of duty, if not outright criminality, should be clawed back and redistributed. It is obscene that Dennis Muilenburg’s separation package is equal to the amount set aside for families of those who died in crashes of the 737 Max.
Attempts to “save” the Boeing of the last century are doomed, because that Boeing hasn’t existed since then, and Boeing of the 21st century is collapsing. For the good of capitalism in America and the communities where it once thrived, Boeing must be excised. Several new companies could take Boeing’s place. This should be expedited and American capitalism set on a path toward a future once promised but forgotten in a maelstrom of corporate greed.
Then a biopsy should be performed, to see if Boeing, Enron, Lehman Brothers, Washington Mutual and Wells Fargo (with some executives finally facing prison) are exceptions or the inevitable result of capitalist energy. Questions need to be asked:
What is the impact on a company when stock options outstrip salary as a portion of total executive compensation? When stock price reflects an emphasis on lowest possible cost, rather than the best possible product? When the take home of top floor executives is based partly on suppressing the livelihood of shop floor workers?
Is a balance possible in capitalism between competing values, or does the system itself require dynamic experimentation, excesses, crashes and disruption that characterize the current situation at Boeing and events like the Great Recession earlier this century? Was that recession caused by anomalous corporate greed in an era of deregulation, or simply the natural outcome of a dynamic, self-regulating capitalist system? Are rules effective, even possible?
What happens when a company begins to focus on its success rather than on what created that success? When does a healthy system grow out of control and become malignant?
Boeing rot again on display
by Erik Dolson
March 7, 2020
Boeing Chief Executive Officer Dave Calhoun has now stepped in another large pile of his own deposit. Think of it as interest on the Boeing’s inheritance from General Electric (G.E.). Just more of the same from the plane maker.
Calhoun was trained by G.E. Chairman Jack Welch, who died last week. Welch was known as “Neutron Jack,” nicknamed after neutron bombs that killed people but left buildings intact. The Welch style of management was ruthless, including termination of 10% of all employees every year.
This had consequences for morale. Several recent Boeing CEOs were from G.E. or heavily influenced by that company. Morale at Boeing suffered, as well.
Boeing’s Calhoun was quoted in an interview that appeared in the New York Times last week as laying the blame for Boeing failures on previous CEO Dennis Muilenberg. “If anybody ran over the rainbow for the pot of gold on stock, it would have been him,” Calhoun said. The problems at Boeing, he said, “speaks to the weakness of our (former) leadership.”
What Calhoun failed to say, possibly because he is incapable of it, was that as an important outside board member, his leadership was part of that weakness as yet another alumnus of General Electric, touted during the 80s and 90s as the zenith of corporate capitalism. In fact, the Welch legacy may be turning out to be a failure when not implemented by Welch.
Growth at all costs, huge payouts based on stock price, and ruthless cutting of costs (talent and expertise) in the effort to increase profits (and bonuses for management) may have resulted in destruction at Boeing and other companies where Welch protégés landed after drinking the G.E. Kool-aid.
That beverage also involves public relations at the expense of honesty. Last month, Calhoun said that emails and texts between Boeing test pilots lamenting the build quality and training of pilots on the 737 Max represented a problem with emails and texts, not the airplanes themselves or culture at the company.
It should be noted that Calhoun stands to receive a rather large fortune if he can quickly get the 737 Max approved by the FAA and flying again.
Denying that the communications between pilots accurately represented a crumbling corporate culture, where engineering decisions were overruled by managers under the gun to cut costs, frightened they might lose their jobs if they failed to do so, Calhoun said the emails and texts would stop.
How reassuring.
Now, Calhoun has turned on the top managers of Boeing that he supported while he was a crucial board member and they were putting profit ahead of safety.
And he has implied it was the fault of pilots who were overpowered by software that flew two of his jetliners into the ground, software that did not exist on aircraft they were trained on. These pilots apparently did not read the fine print in manuals that accompanied the new planes. Shame on them.
The loss of 348 lives had nothing to do with greed and failure to provide adequate instrumentation and training.
His hand in the till while he is cracking the whip, Calhoun has defended his salary and is in full CYA mode, rather than being accountable. This is the G.E. way when followed by men other than the admittedly brilliant Jack Welch, who was dealing with a fat corporation in another era.
The leadership at Boeing is still in denial, which means the company has not yet hit bottom. This is not over. Even NASA recently suggested that agency no longer trusts the company.
Small wonder. Boeing will not recover until the company redevelops the honesty required to admit and then publicly correct rot caused by 40 years of misdirected leadership. Boeing builds airplanes. Airplanes need to be safe, not just profitable.
There was another capitalist icon of the 1980’s era who seems to have been forgotten in recent decades: W. Edwards Deming, who was essential to the rise of Toyota and other Japanese automakers. Like Welch, Deming was a believer in statistics and process control, and the elimination of defects in manufacturing.
But Deming also advocated team building (rather than cutthroat competition among fellow employees), distribution of responsibility and accountability (as opposed to top management collecting absurdly valuable stock options via intimidation), and listening to those actually doing the work (as opposed to firing or smothering dissenting voices).
Calhoun has to go. He is not the man for this job. No graduate from G.E.’s school of abusive management is. Perhaps Boeing could lure Dan Davis, former director of Motorsports for Ford Motor Company, out of retirement for a couple of years. Davis has a resumé and a style that Boeing needs about now.