Already a subscriber?The strange thing about the Boeing crisis is that so many people saw it coming – and tried to stop it. The planemaker’s safety problems have been obvious since two 737 Max jets crashed in late 2018 and early 2019, killing 346 people. Boeing’s engineers were warning managers of potential quality problems as far back as 2001. But Boeing executives must not have listened and the 737 Max crashes apparently weren’t a sufficiently loud wake-up call.
After decades of hiring accountants to run the company, Boeing’s board should know that it’s problems are not ones of arithmetic. There’s no shortage of ways for senior executives to listen; leaders just need to be proactive about doing it. Sitting back and saying “my door’s always open” isn’t nearly enough, as Megan Reitz of Oxford University’s Saïd Business School, author ofThat’s especially important in the face of what Columbia University sociologist Diane Vaughan has called “the normalisation of deviance.