Most of these "bean counters" don't even work for Boeing. They're institutional investors and hedge funds who only care about share price. In other words, Wall

Most of these "bean counters" don't even work for Boeing. They're institutional investors and hedge funds who only care about share price. In other words, Wall Street. Boeing's mistake was in listening only to these folks and using share price as their sole success metric. Goodheart's Law took over. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law Capitalism before the late 20th century had as its mantra "Build a quality product. Keep the customers and workers happy and the share price will take care of itself." Around 1980 that changed to "Bump the share price and to hell with everything else."