Why Did Boeing's Culture Trade Fail?
When the Accountants Bought the Engineers
📜 What Happened
For 80 years Boeing was an engineers' church — 'if it's not Boeing, I'm not going.' Then the 1997 McDonnell Douglas merger put finance culture in charge: headquarters moved away from the factories, stock buybacks outranked new aircraft, and outsourcing chased quarterly margins. The 737 MAX was the endpoint — an old airframe stretched one more time to avoid a costly new design, with software (MCAS) papering over the physics and training costs minimized as a selling point. Two crashes, 346 deaths, a 20-month grounding.
☠️ The Fatal Mistake
Letting the scorekeepers replace the builders — every individual decision saved money, and the sum of them broke the thing that made the money possible.
🧠 The Lesson (Free for You)
Culture isn't a poster; it's who wins arguments. The day your cost-cutters can overrule your craftsmen on safety-critical calls, the countdown starts — you just don't know the number.
📕 The Antidote Book
Collins's team spent five years studying 1,435 companies to find the few that went from average to sustained greatness (beating the market 3x+ for 15 years) — and what separated them from identical competitors who…
📖 OPEN THE FULL INTERACTIVE BREAKDOWN →Searchable, filterable, free to read — they paid billions; your lesson is free.