Before he was Boeing’s latest humbled and contrite chief executive officer, Dave Calhoun was the co-author of a manual for aspiring business leaders. The 2010 book How Companies Win preached the importance of giving customers innovative products they might not even know they need. It was the losers who kept churning out the same things year after year.
Calhoun’s Boeing, demonstrably, has not won. As well as more than $US23 billion ($35 billion) during his four years as CEO, it’s lost the trust of fliers, the patience of airline customers and the indulgence of regulators. Now that Calhoun is leaving by year’s end, it’s also lost the fiction that he was ever the right leader to fix it. And over the long run, that may be a good thing.
Bloomberg Businessweek
![“We’re having a birthday party for [daughter] Rada in a few weeks and we’re going to get the truck to come, which is a real flex,” O’Neill says.](https://static.ffx.io/images/$zoom_0.7012%2C$multiply_2%2C$ratio_1.777778%2C$width_1059%2C$x_732%2C$y_641/t_crop_custom/c_scale%2Cw_600%2Cq_52%2Cf_auto/b5e4395344f07ccd1e3a348af02af77c8eeb8d1b)
