Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing

by Peter Robison

“If in fact there’s a reverse takeover, with the McDonnell ethos permeating Boeing, then Boeing is doomed to mediocrity,” he said. “There’s one thing that made Boeing really great all the way along. They always understood that they were an engineering-driven company, not a financially driven company. If they’re no longer honoring that as their central mission, then over time they’ll just become another company.”

July 2014, McNerney, approaching sixty-five, was asked on a conference call if he planned to retire that year. He was feeling confident enough to joke, “The heart will still be beating, the employees will still be cowering.”

“In the past, we may have said our best engineers are working on the new thing,” he said. “Now, we want our best engineers working on innovative reuse.”

In regular Thursday meetings, she encouraged the pilots to give her good news, not bad news—an inversion of Mulally’s old rule about not hiding problems.

Then he put his finger on the forces that had been building for years, decades even, and would soon destroy lives and reputations: “It’s systemic. It’s culture. It’s the fact that we have a senior leadership team that understand very little about the business and yet are driving us to certain objectives. Its [sic] lots of individual groups that aren’t working closely and being accountable…. Sometimes you have to let things fail big so that everyone can identify a problem.”