I watched a documentary that said Spirit came when the Boeing bean counters divided up the company to make a quick profit and be able to shift Blake to Spirit. They replaced vertical integration with circular blame.
The Boeing documentaries I've seen have all been great. It really shows the issues with the Jack Welch model of business that only cares about short term quarterly profits. My father used to complain that every new CEO at his company would first fire a bunch of people to make stock go up even knowing the long term implications would be disastrous. He used to say you could train a monkey to press a button and do that. In the case of Boeing, they used to have an engineering culture that prized innovation and safety. Now they don't even know how to make planes anymore from scratch. All they seem to be capable of is modifying existing designs that are now practically ancient. In my eyes it's like having to do a 5000 mile car race and using a bunch of NOS at the beginning. You get ahead of everyone and then blow out the engine and everyone ends up getting way ahead (ok, I don't know much about cars). It's just overly short term thinking.
> My father used to complain that every new CEO at his company would first fire a bunch of people to make stock go up
Yup. My last company had a disastrous CEO who used public layoffs as his only lever. It worked once, despite a total of four pulls. The engineering departments were gutted and nobody really knew how everything worked anymore.
Somehow the company is still alive, though with a share price now about 1/20th what it was and 1/60th its typical highs.
Yes, but to be fair the reporting is incomplete because the Boeing-maintained records of the maintenance were incomplete in seemingly-deliberate ways. So... we just don't know. At least one, plausibly two bad guys there.
As far as I can make out, Spirit employees (probably with the knowledge and tacit approval of management, because that's the way these things usually go) found a loophole in the record system that allowed them to avoid triggering QA checks. Boeing has blame for creating a system with such a loophole, or failing to find it before it was used, but it was Spirit personnel who actually used it.
IIRC from one of the whistle-blower accounts, the main issue was that the Boeing computer system only had an option for fully removing the door, which wasn't done, only a partial removal to allow access to the parts needing work. There was then a disjoint between the Spirit work system and the Boeing one which resulted in someone saying "fuck it" and skipping it.
Heh, they're the good guys in this story apparently.