The most important bad decisions in the Boeing case were made in 2011-13, when they promised that the 737 Max would not require a new type certificate for someo

The most important bad decisions in the Boeing case were made in 2011-13, when they promised that the 737 Max would not require a new type certificate for someone with a 737 cert already, and that it would use the new, larger, and more efficient engines. At that point in time, the CEO of Boeing was James McNerney, who had a Harvard MBA, worked at P&G and McKinsey, then spent 20 years at GE (running their airplane engine business). When he lost the race to succeed Jack Welsh he went to 3M and then was picked to run Boeing. At the time that these key bad decisions were made for the 737 Max, Dennis Muilenberg- the engineer you cite- was running the Boeing Integrated Defense side of the house and had no authority on the 737 Max. He does bear some responsibility for the Max- he was CEO when it first flew, got certified, was delivered to customers, and the first crash that was not investigated with appropriate speed- but the most important bad decision was made when a MBA was running the company. International airliners and semiconductors are two areas where I've become convinced that engineering CEO's are required, because they both involve making 10 billion or more dollar investments that won't even enter the market for more than 5 years. So you need someone with a very good feel for technological possibility, one who understands that you can't bafflegab mother nature the way that Harvard's MBA school teaches you to. It's possible I'm over-indexing on Boeing and Intel: Airbus' big recent fiasco- though since it didn't kill anyone it's not nearly as big as the 737 Max- the A380, was largely a commercial failure not an engineering one (by some estimates the A380 never even turned a profit on fly-away costs, totally ignoring development costs). So maybe having Harvard MBA's and market people would have saved them. On the other hand, when those key decisions were made (2000 was when the A3XX was approved) Airbus had a convoluted two CEO-two Chairman structure designed (to this American's jaded eye) to prevent any personal responsibility from leaching back to the bosses, so I can't tell you who was in charge when the wrong decisions were made for that program.