Comment by Zigurd

That's a broad brush you get there. There have been detailed investigations that show that specific actions by specific people in Boeing and the FAA led to a single point of failure, from which it is nearly impossible to recover, being permitted to get into production, in a passenger aircraft. On top of that, after one of those planes crashed in a way that is attributable to this gross defect, the pilots were blamed by Boeing, to deflect from having to fix this defect.

So, while it may come down to that you can't run an airplane maker like a soft drink company, there is a lot of detailed information about why. No need to generalize.

In fact there are confounding details that suggest that "MBA manager" is the wrong generalization. Dennis Mullenberg, who was the CEO fired due to the 737 fiasco, came up through Boeing engineering, after joining as an intern in the 1980s.

He was replaced by David Calhoun, a director at Boeing, who came up through GE and Blackstone and was the co-author of a generic seeming self-congratulatory business book called "How Companies Win: Profiting from Demand-Driven Business Models No Matter What Business You're In" That sure makes it seem like he could sell Coke on Tuesday and airliners on Thursday.

Maybe the real answer is that the FAA was lulled into complacency, and an engineer who should have been minding the shop wasn't.