>Dennis Muilenberg likely was being fed a diet of wrong and horrible information from lower executives keen on deflecting blame so that they could keep their jobs.

Your job as CEO, or any leader of a large organization civilian or military, is to ferret out when you're being fed loads of BS. It's frustrating because Muilenberg was a engineer and started there as an intern in the 80s, so he at least should have some domain expertise in what the problems were. Perhaps him being a "company man" in this case was a hindrance, or conflicted with the new culture at Boeing that is, apparently, run by MBAs concerned with quarterly profits. In either case, he needed to go as this failure happened on his watch.