They're too big and too important to go through Chapter 7 bankruptcy, but Chapter 11 bankruptcy can and should happen. Wipe out the shareholders and executives but keep the company intact.

Boeing, even without the military connection, is one of the more important companies in the US for exports. They are also too big to fail. It's very much in the national interest for them to right the ship. The same is true of Intel. Their domestic fabs are -very- important to NatSec.

If you consider it national interest, why as the biggest shareholder and bagholder do you not have board members that veto actions that are profitable but bad for national interest?

Isn’t that sort of distributed setup what caused this in the first place?

Boeing got addicted to cutting and outsourcing to improve the stock same shit that kills every bigco

Boeing shareholders haven't earned a proper return in half a decade, but the idiots kept voting in the same blockhead of a CEO. Serves 'em right.

Shareholders are almost always best served by a product-first CEO who maximizes the long-term value proposition of the company.

I can't see why you're being downvoted.

The unfortunate reality is that those who implement policies that produce short term gain but long term costs that strike after they have moved on look better than those who actually look to the long haul.

I'm not sure Boeing's problems are entirely due to the bureaucratic horse trading that infests many government acquisition programs. That issue shouldn't have affected their commercial airplanes, which seems to suffer from similar quality issues.

It actually seems to be a systemic issue that has been affecting many American companies and slowly grown worse over the last 50 years. The management views themselves as increasingly indispensable and the lower ranks of workers as commodities subject to arbitrage, where 10 years experience at this company is somehow just as valuable as 10 years somewhere else - despite not having the same institutional knowledge and connections. We've seen this with traditional "American" companies, such as Ford and GM, and even with the more established companies in the tech sector.

This is fundamentally caused by a shift how management has operated. The emphasis on market performance over dividends and increasingly public role of business leadership. With that, executive compensation becomes another signal of a company's confidence as a tool to drive market price. Businesses compete over lavish executive perks not to find the best talent, but as conspicuous consumption to signal their value to investors.

At the same time, human resources have worked to standardize and measure workers. Trying to turn them into interchangeable cogs, because it seems cheaper to think that way. But people are not cogs and reducing people to keywords on a resume loses valuable data. This is true when apples to oranges comparisons are made between the current employees and prospective employees. The precise nature of experience and how it maps to their company is lost so current employees are undervalued in the comparison. Likewise the value of proximity and relationships between management and workers and even local governments. This has lead to many off-shoring decisions that led to unexpected losses in the medium term, some of which were ultimately rolled back.

Why would I want to hire all the engineers? Surely at least some share the blame. I don't really agree with you in general, but if I were starting a new company I'd probably be pretty selective about hiring Boeing engineers if I really thought it were a pervasive company culture problem.

That was done, by executive order during wartime, to some underperforming manufacturing companies during WWII. Here's that story, by the Navy admiral who personally led the takeover of the plants.[2] The Navy fired the C-suite of the Los Angeles Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company, at 10 AM on December 8, 1943, for incompetence. "Mr. McCoomb was informed that he, Mr. Alfred F. Smith, and the comptroller, Mr. Beeman, were informed that they were no longer on the payroll of the plant". Eventually the Government had to settle up with the stockholders, but the C-suite people were gone.

[2] https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015006391265&vi...

Something like the Defense Production Act alone technically gives the government the authority to control civilian production in virtually any way if it meets a standard based on criticality to national defense (not hard to imagine the argument for boeing).

Using that power requires political support from the legislature and courts, I don't think we're there today, but if for example a critical fighter jet (or some other high visibility project) went south, boeing has been shitting the bed hard enough to support federal intervention.

They can't per say fire them. But they could start cancelling contracts if they think Boeing isn't going to deliver. And they can break up the company into smaller ones to foster competition this has happened in the past in other industries.

Nationalize it and replace the board. Imagine the govt as an activist investor if the profit driven investors are more keen to scrap it for profits.

Expensively.