WOEING: What’s Gone Wrong at Boeing.

Harry Stonecipher, who had been CEO of McDonnell Douglas and was CEO of Boeing from 2003 to 2005, said: “When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it’s run like a business rather than a great engineering firm.”

Corporate culture can be a notoriously squishy topic—too readily subject to broad generalizations. And, of course, all big companies are interested in making money and boosting their stock price. But even if corporate cultures are hard to characterize accurately, they’re still real. As the management theorist Edgar Schein defined it, the essence of corporate culture is “the learned, shared, tacit assumptions on which people base their daily behavior.” In the old Boeing, the people who dictated those assumptions were the engineers. In the post-merger Boeing, the people who did so were more likely to be accountants.

For some businesses, a shift to a greater emphasis on bottom-line considerations might not have mattered that much. But manufacturing airliners in large numbers is not one of those businesses. That’s because making big aircraft is an unreasonably difficult thing to do. A plane like the 737 Max has, by some accounts, more than half a million parts. Boeing now outsources much of its production, leaving assembly as its main job, so those parts are made by at least 600 suppliers (many of which, in turn, rely on subcontractors). Supervising the reliability of the manufacturing and quality-control processes at all of those different suppliers, while ensuring the reliability of Boeing’s own assembly processes, requires a maniacal attention to detail, a willingness to spend freely on reliability and safety, and a culture that tolerates the reporting of mistakes and the investment of serious resources in fixing them.

That ethos is hard to instill using only financial incentives or the threat of firing. What’s really needed is a culture of perfectionism—and that’s what Boeing seems to have lost over the past 20 or so years.

One of Beoing’s problems is that it isn’t even run like a well-run business, much less like the engineering firm it used to be and ought to be.