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

by Peter Robison

Once ruled by engineers who thumbed their noses at Wall Street, Boeing had reinvented itself into one of the most shareholder-friendly creatures of the market. It celebrated managers for cost cutting, co-opted regulators with heaps of money, and pressured suppliers with Walmart-style tactics.

In his home office, Morton kept a list of “things to remember”: Courage. Will. Perseverance. Skill. “And in flying, the superior pilot uses superior judgment to avoid situations that might require the use of superior skill!”

“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.”

The basic point was that outsourcing is never simple. Design specifications actually had to be more precise, because any omissions would lead to costly disputes involving lawyers. Making sure the work got done right led to additional overhead costs that no one had counted on. Finally, all those extra costs had the perverse effect of making the company doing the outsourcing look less efficient than the ones it awarded business to—a vicious cycle that only encouraged more of the same destructive behavior.