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Brown chronicles the decades-long rivalry between Boeing and Airbus. He traces how Boeing went from the world's greatest engineering company to a company plagued by safety failures, arguing the transformation happened when MBAs replaced engineers in the executive suite.
Canon
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Brown argues that Boeing's engineers had derived deep meaning from their responsibility to build safe aircraft. When the finance-first culture subordinated safety to cost-cutting, engineers lost both their meaning and their institutional power, and quality collapsed.
Highlights
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Boeing's decline began when it merged with McDonnell Douglas and adopted a finance-first culture that replaced engineering excellence with cost cutting
Brown traces Boeing's safety failures (737 MAX crashes, 787 production defects, quality issues) to the 1997 McDonnell Douglas merger, which shifted Boeing's culture from engineering-driven to finance-driven. McDonnell Douglas executives took over and prioritized margins over planes.