Jerry Useem writes:

The sight of Bill Boeing was a familiar one on the factory floor. His office was in the building next to the converted boatyard where workers lathed the wood, sewed the fabric wings, and fixed the control wires of the Boeing Model C airplane. there is no authority except facts. facts are obtained by accurate observation read a plaque affixed outside the door. And what could need closer observation than the process of his aircraft being built? One day in 1916, Boeing spotted an imperfectly cut wing rib, dropped it to the floor, and slowly stomped it to bits. “I, for one, will close up shop rather than send out work of this kind,” he declared.

When David Calhoun, the soon-to-be-lame-duck CEO of the company Boeing founded, made a rare appearance on the shop floor in Seattle one day this past January, circumstances were decidedly different. Firmly a member of the CEO class, schooled at the knee of General Electric’s Jack Welch, Calhoun had not strolled over from next door but flown some 2,300 miles from Boeing’s headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. And he was not there to observe slipshod work before it found its way into the air—it already had. A few weeks earlier, the door of a Boeing 737 had fallen out mid-flight. In the days following his visit, Calhoun’s office admitted that it still didn’t know quite what had gone wrong, because it didn’t know how the plane had been put together in the first place. The door’s restraining bolts had either been screwed in wrong, or not at all. Boeing couldn’t say, because, as it told astonished regulators, the company had “no records of the work being performed.” [Continue reading…]