[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.