I'm not sure Boeing's problems are entirely due to the bureaucratic horse trading that infests many government acquisition programs. That issue shouldn't have a

I'm not sure Boeing's problems are entirely due to the bureaucratic horse trading that infests many government acquisition programs. That issue shouldn't have affected their commercial airplanes, which seems to suffer from similar quality issues. It actually seems to be a systemic issue that has been affecting many American companies and slowly grown worse over the last 50 years. The management views themselves as increasingly indispensable and the lower ranks of workers as commodities subject to arbitrage, where 10 years experience at this company is somehow just as valuable as 10 years somewhere else - despite not having the same institutional knowledge and connections. We've seen this with traditional "American" companies, such as Ford and GM, and even with the more established companies in the tech sector. This is fundamentally caused by a shift how management has operated. The emphasis on market performance over dividends and increasingly public role of business leadership. With that, executive compensation becomes another signal of a company's confidence as a tool to drive market price. Businesses compete over lavish executive perks not to find the best talent, but as conspicuous consumption to signal their value to investors. At the same time, human resources have worked to standardize and measure workers. Trying to turn them into interchangeable cogs, because it seems cheaper to think that way. But people are not cogs and reducing people to keywords on a resume loses valuable data. This is true when apples to oranges comparisons are made between the current employees and prospective employees. The precise nature of experience and how it maps to their company is lost so current employees are undervalued in the comparison. Likewise the value of proximity and relationships between management and workers and even local governments. This has lead to many off-shoring decisions that led to unexpected losses in the medium term, some of which were ultimately rolled back.