In today's culture, I often hear C-suiters talking about how much "risk" they are taking, to justify their outrageous salaries and stock holdings, but I almost never see them pay much, in the way of penalties, except for the very smallest, most "raw" companies, where they have, literally, sunk their entire net worth into the endeavor.

It seems that, once a company has reached a certain threshold, the only real "risk" that executives experience, is that they'll only get a 5% bonus, instead of 30%. So, only $5M, as opposed to $30M.

AUTHORITEH: "Put out your hand!"

GUILTEH: "OK"

AUTHORITEH: <SLAP> "Bad Executive! Bad, bad, Executive! Don't let it happen again! See you at the party on Saturday?"

Boeing's problem is its management. If you tell the rank-and-file worker to use the company's billions of dollars worth of production capital to build a quality airplane and hold them to it, they've shown they have the ability to do so in the past.

I agree with that statement, but want so add: I believe that whatever you propose will have significant problems and is likely worse than the status quo in some major way. Sometimes I'll only be able to tell you what those problems are in hindsight. Sometimes those problems are fixable sometimes not.

Don't let this dissuade you from thinking about the problem - it needs to be thought about. However do think about is in more than a shallow way, look at it from all viewpoints (including ones of people who disagree with) try to see what the downsides are and how to mitigate them. Good luck, if enough people do this maybe someone will come up with a good enough answer, (as opposed to perfect!) and you will understand the problem well enough to help debate why the downsides are worth it.