One of many problems with the Grauniad story is that it gets history backwards. It was the pre-McMerger Boeing that hadn't had a peer competitor since the 1970s, a result of the suicide-pact development of the DC-10-10 and L-1011 - those were the last two all-new non-Boeing airliners launched in the US, 51 years ago. That was why Boeing could afford the massive overruns on the 777. Not until the late 1990s did Airbus really start to catch up and put some pressure on Seattle.
Neither was "classic" Boeing perfect: the Macs crew had nothing to do with the botched launch of the 737NG, the result of the "engineer-driven" culture's failure to fix a ramshackle system of configuration control that dated back to the Flying Fortress.
That said: the current obsession with share price is not a good thing. Share price is an indicator of the company's worth, but when management focuses solely on share price, it's like a school "teaching to the test": buybacks and dividends are used to pump the price.