After Calhoun graduated from college, he gained employment at General Electric (GE). He decided to work for GE at that time, due to its close proximity to where he lived in Lehigh Valley.[citation needed] He worked at GE for 26 years, overseeing transportation, aircraft engines, reinsurance, lighting and other GE units, before ultimately being appointed as vice chairman of the company and a member of GE's Board of Directors in 2005 ,

Calhoun left GE to join privately held global information services firm VNU as CEO in 2006. Under his leadership the company rebranded itself as Nielsen Holdings, returned to the public markets in 2011, and was added to the S&P 500 Index in 2013.[citation needed] In 2014, Calhoun became executive chairman of Nielsen, and also joined The Blackstone Group as a senior managing director and head of portfolio operations and a member of Blackstone's management committee. Blackstone had been one of six private equity firms that backed Nielsen's transformation.[citation needed] During his career, Calhoun was on the board of directors of Caterpillar, Gates Corporation, and Medtronic.[citation needed]

Since 2009, Calhoun has served as a director at Boeing, and was named lead independent director in 2018. In October 2019, he was named chairman of Boeing in the wake of the Boeing 737 MAX groundings, and on December 23, 2019, he stepped down as chairman in preparation for becoming Boeing's CEO and president, effective January 13, 2020.[citation needed]

In a March 2020 interview with The New York Times, Calhoun discussed the 737 MAX's MCAS software, saying the Boeing had made a "fatal mistake" in expecting that pilots could immediately correct the software problems. He went on to explain that "pilots [in Ethiopia and Indonesia] don't have anywhere near the experience that they have here in the U.S."; he unsuccessfully requested to go off the record after being asked whether American pilots would have been able to control the situation, and then replied, forget it, you can guess the answer."

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