“One day in 1916, [Bill] Boeing spotted an imperfectly cut wing rib, dropped it to the floor, and slowly stomped it to bits. ‘I, for one, will close up shop rather than send out work of this kind,’ he declared.”

Useem compares this anecdote to a much more recent tale: “When David Calhoun, the soon-to-be-lame-duck CEO of the company Boeing founded, made a rare appearance on the shop floor in Seattle one day this past January … he was not there to observe slipshod work before it found its way into the air—it already had. A few weeks earlier, the door of a Boeing 737 had fallen out mid-flight.”

“The two scenes tell us the peculiar story of a plane maker that, over 25 years, slowly but very deliberately extracted itself from the business of making planes,” Useem writes. “For nearly 40 years the company built the 737 fuselage itself in the same plant that turned out its B-29 and B-52 bombers. In 2005 it sold this facility to a private-investment firm, keeping the axle grease at arm’s length and notionally shifting risk, capital costs, and labor woes off its books onto its ‘supplier.’ ‘Offloading,’ Boeing called it. Meanwhile the tail, landing gear, flight controls, and other essentials were outsourced to factories around the world owned by others, and shipped to Boeing for final assembly, turning the company that created the Jet Age into something akin to a glorified gluer-together of precast model-airplane kits.”

“The past 30 years may well be remembered as a dark age of U.S. manufacturing,” Useem writes. “Boeing’s decline illustrates everything that went wrong to bring us here. Fortunately, it also offers a lesson in how to get back out.”

Emerging from this dark age, Useem writes, “must begin with a recognition that something has been lost.” And said ascension might have already started: “Boeing’s chief financial officer recently admitted that the company got ‘a little too far ahead of itself on the topic of outsourcing,’” Useem continues. Can the company rediscover its engineering soul?