Fixing Boeing’s Broken Culture Starts With a New Plane
A narrow focus on cost-cutting led to compromises that plunged the company into crisis.
Investigation involving Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 on a Boeing 737 Max in Portland, Oregon.
Source: NTSB
Before he was Boeing Co.’s latest humbled and contrite chief executive officer, Dave Calhoun was the co-author of a manual for aspiring business leaders. The 2010 book, How Companies Win, preached the importance of giving customers innovative products they might not even know they need. It was the losers who kept churning out the same things year after year.
Calhoun’s Boeing, demonstrably, has not won. In addition to more than $23 billion during his four years as CEO, it’s lost the trust of fliers, the patience of airline customers and the indulgence of regulators. Now that Calhoun is leaving by year’s end, it’s also lost the fiction that he was ever the right leader to fix it. And over the long run, that may be a good thing.