For those who don't want to read the whole thing. Boeing is a quintessential example of America’s rotting business culture over the past 40 years. It’s also q

For those who don't want to read the whole thing. Boeing is a quintessential example of America’s rotting business culture over the past 40 years. It’s also questionable whether other major companies with a similar maximize-shareholder-value-at-all-costs ethos will learn from the mistakes. But it’s clear that what Boeing — and the entire American corporate body politic — needs is nothing short of a philosophical counterrevolution. An investigation into battery fires on Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner in 2013 found that it wasn’t allowing engineers to stress test its products enough, that it wasn’t catching manufacturing defects, and that passengers could be in danger as a result. A manager lamented to one of Robison’s sources that people would “have to die” before Boeing made changes to the aircraft. At the root of this shake-up was the influence of the economist Milton Friedman of the University of Chicago....One of Friedman’s disciples, the economist Michael Jensen, took the theory a step further in 1976 and argued that the corporation should be built to serve the interests of shareholders. The CEO who best personified this ideology was Jack Welch, who helmed General Electric from 1981 to 2001...But a corporation can run on past innovation only for so long. In 2018, after over 100 years of prestige, GE was dropped from the Dow Jones Industrial Average because of the work Welch did to hollow it out. In 2019, the Business Roundtable, an advocacy group formed in the 1970s for corporations, read the populist tea leaves and published a statement that said the purpose of a corporation was to serve all stakeholders, “customers, employees, suppliers, communities and shareholders.” But more fundamentally, it will take a total rethink of America’s corporate incentive structure. Instead of favoring shareholders and playing a quarterly game with Wall Street, C-suites should prioritize sustainable, long-term businesses that employ as many productive workers as possible.