[ehvatum]

Because building planes is an engineering task.

Let’s use your argument: Would you hire a lawyer to captain a ship? Why not? It’s not like the captain actually steers the ship or oils the engine.

You see? It’s not that hard to think a tiny tiny little bit.

[RandomLensman]

The CEO is building a plane? The head of a shipping company builds ships or captains a ship?

[happytiger]

No it’s the executives role to set the culture and nurture the concerns of quality that are lacking in this organization. And quality is a product engineering attribute and a product of manufacturing concerns being powerful enough within an organization to be addressed, so I was making the suggestion that perhaps an engineer should be in the seat until the problem is remedied.

[RandomLensman]

Lots of other disciplines care about quality.

[happytiger]

Lots of other disciplines are irrelevant when you’re talking about actual aircraft manufacturing and not the soft concept of quality.

Edit: aircraft engineering organizations require an executive that understands the airline market and how to build airplanes. This company in particular needs a fixer to address quality problems and reassure the market that substantive changes to the quality of manufacturing will be made.

An expert in toy manufacturing who ran Mattel shouldn’t be overseeing jet aircraft production and this idea that they can do so effectively is a big part of the reason companies continually fall down on manufacturing quality and flame out like GE, HP, and now Boeing are doing. Sorry. This idea that a CEO without a background in aerospace can just fly in and fix everything because of transferrable skills sounds good but it’s just simply not true and in fact is the exact and very specific management theory and corporate ideology that is the root cause of the problems at the core issues this company is experiencing*.

[RandomLensman]

There is nothing soft about quality in producing pharmaceuticals, for example.

I'd say there are number of industries and backgrounds a "quality in production" CEO could come from.

Edit: I even agree with need to understand the market and manufacturing, but it could come from being an engineer, a physicist, a mathematician etc.

[fuzzfactor]

For these type of job hops many fundamental quality principles carry forward, but each is a whole new ball game when you got into it. Also for instance with pharmaceuticals as well as fuels you still use the exact same models of the latest spectrometers and chromatographs, so specialized expertise here carries over ideally but that is just the instrument, not the particular science being conducted.

What it comes down to is that someone with decades of experience in pharma can be useful in the fuel lab and vice versa, but it still takes years to get up to speed before the wisest decisions can be made since either way this type of thing is not soft about quality. That much it shares with aircraft reliability.

It takes a certain type of leadership to prevail in a situation like Boeing (and many others) did during World War II, and this has been so sorely lost by now that there is very little remaining linkage back to the real thing.

And while I'm here don't ask me how I know the airline companies' fuel is tested as reliably as their fuselages, and by a bureau with management hierarchy having a degree of dedication that's noticeably more modern than what was once expected in the past.

[hughesjj]

I don't think the pedigree matters as much as for the leadership of a company to really know their product and market. I don't think that ex Boeing engineer turned ex Boeing CEO really knew their product given how absurd the procedures sounded to pilots around mcas and now with this de-icing issue.

[jpalawaga]

what did ballmer do at microsoft before he was CEO? What did microsoft look like after he became CEO?

Same questions, but with Satya. There's a reason Apple strongly prefers to hire from within. Actually, you could ask the same questions about jobs and cook.

You need to live and breathe the company. Further, the executive's background WILL play a role in the company's direction.