Boeing Executives Can’t Keep Getting Away With This

Dave Calhoun, the CEO of Boeing, a man groomed in the “screw the last dime out of a company” culture under Jack Welch at General Electric before taking over at Boeing, delivered a gem of management-speak in trying to explain why the company’s 737 MAX jets are so plagued with problems: there had been a “quality escape” on the production line.

Under Calhoun, Boeing, in just four years, has lost all trace of its legendary reputation for pioneering the jet age and keeping a relentless focus on safety.

The most egregious thing about today’s Boeing is not “quality escape” but the escape of Calhoun and his C-suite colleagues from all accountability for systematically destroying the institutional memory and gutting an engineering culture that supported a peerless planemaker.