Boeing: The perfect story of what’s wrong with America’s economy? | Gautam Mukunda

Boeing’s bright spot this year was the hiring of its new CEO, an engineer and aerospace chief named Kelly Ortberg, after years of finance men at the helm. But Ortberg’s arrival is clouded by the controversies hanging over Boeing, from hours-long hearings on safety issues to a fraud charge to the first worker strike in 16 years. Let’s not forget the stranded astronauts at the International Space Station. Boeing’s troubles started long before two 737 MAX planes crashed in less than five months between 2018 and 2019, killing 346 people. Several experts point to the 1997 merger between McDonnell Douglas and Boeing as the trigger. What followed was a series of leadership decisions that prioritized profits and quarterly earnings over planes, according to Gautam Mukunda, a leadership expert, Harvard fellow and author of “Indispensable: When Leaders Really Matter.” “It is a story about a larger pathology in the American corporate sector that just devastated the American economy and turned