Meanwhile, Boeing sold deadly products under leadership by their engineer CEO.
I see the "bean counter bad" narrative a lot here, but I don't think it's that black and white.
At the time that these key bad decisions were made for the 737 Max, Dennis Muilenberg- the engineer you cite- was running the Boeing Integrated Defense side of the house and had no authority on the 737 Max. He does bear some responsibility for the Max- he was CEO when it first flew, got certified, was delivered to customers, and the first crash that was not investigated with appropriate speed- but the most important bad decision was made when a MBA was running the company.
International airliners and semiconductors are two areas where I've become convinced that engineering CEO's are required, because they both involve making 10 billion or more dollar investments that won't even enter the market for more than 5 years. So you need someone with a very good feel for technological possibility, one who understands that you can't bafflegab mother nature the way that Harvard's MBA school teaches you to.
It's possible I'm over-indexing on Boeing and Intel: Airbus' big recent fiasco- though since it didn't kill anyone it's not nearly as big as the 737 Max- the A380, was largely a commercial failure not an engineering one (by some estimates the A380 never even turned a profit on fly-away costs, totally ignoring development costs). So maybe having Harvard MBA's and market people would have saved them. On the other hand, when those key decisions were made (2000 was when the A3XX was approved) Airbus had a convoluted two CEO-two Chairman structure designed (to this American's jaded eye) to prevent any personal responsibility from leaching back to the bosses, so I can't tell you who was in charge when the wrong decisions were made for that program.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/chi-0402290256feb29-story.htm...
It seems to me like the disposition of the CEO matters a lot more than their formal background. If an engineer rose through the ranks by siding with the MBA/accountants/bean-counting-culture in a company, he is likely to run it in the (presumably correctly maligned) bean-counting ways. Whereas an accountant who understands the bean-counters but has seen the pitfalls of that kind of management could easily decide not to manage like a bean-counter.
I remember hearing I think in a documentary that the merger with McDonall-Douglas made it have a more business-y culture that lead the the terrible failures.
The person who pushed back the hardest against the McDonnell-Douglas merger was the Boeing CFO Boyd Givan. He was quickly ousted not long after the deal was finalized, accused of being too financially conservative compared to McDonnell-Douglas' M.O.: https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=19980715&slug...
The blame ultimately rests with the Boeing board. There was a minority faction on the board that fought tooth-and-nail. They couldn't stop it, but IIRC their concession (to prevent the minority from creating a ruckus in public) was being able to keep Givan as CFO after the merger. But Condit ensured that that didn't last long by undermining Givan at every turn, which was probably the plan of the majority board faction all along.
Based on this and a few other anecdotes, and if we're making wild speculations, I'd say that whether a CFO makes a good CEO depends on the type of CFO. There's the traditional CFO--the "bean counter"--whose job is to manage the money and keep a low profile so the rest of the company can do their thing. Then there are the new generations of CFO, which started coming up the ranks in the 1970s and 1980s (see, e.g., McDonnell-Douglas), who see creative accounting (aka financial engineering) as a legitimate way to boost stockholder value and an end in itself, independent of a company's core competency. If a company has good bones, a traditional CFO can make a great steward at the very least. For the new type of CFO, they often couldn't care less about a company's core competency, and are more speculator than bean counter, at least in the traditional meanings of those terms.
Rackspace on the other hand is in the middle of a pretty cut-throat market segment, with lots of competitors and a large need to keep up with them feature wise. You absolutely need a visionary / this is what our market will look like in 3 years person running the show here. Rackspace could have filled a need between Digital Ocean and AWS, but I don't think they ever saw it that way....
It seems like there should be a lot of overlap, but I think accountants have a better grasp of the underlying business reality. Or at lest the idea that you can’t get something for nothing so saving money on X likely costs you elsewhere.