If you’re familiar with Boeing’s 737 Max story, you know they’ve announced temporary grounding production of that plane following the two deadly accidents earlier this year. The bigger story is that it rattles the supply chain. Last month, David Gelles featured Doug Parker, the CEO of American Airlines in his Corner Office New York Times column. AA of course expects some compensation from Boeing for being unable to fly their planes and so do the rest of the airlines.
” …stopping MAX production for one quarter would shave 0.3 of a percentage point from quarterly annualized GDP growth. “
WSJ, citing Wilmington Trust study
What’t Boeing CEO to do ? Other than hang his hat.
If I were him, I would have set up an Emergency Task Team back in March. The Task Team should have been coordinating all efforts at securing this program. They cut back production seriously: from 590 to 42 a month is a steep fall. Could they have done better ? Hard to say, because halting production makes sense when the FAA fell behind on their schedule, which they did when their approval didn’t come out on schedule. (was it October they were saying ?)
Perhaps Boeing should have cut production when the FAA dragged its feet.
Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg in Oct. : “That accountability starts with me.”
I will say that individuals’ lack of responsibility is what created this situation. Every individual’s lack of responsibility compounds an error in size. It’s not the CEO’s fault if individual responsibility is not taken. Individual errors become halos in organizational errors.