I've started to bring up Admiral Rickover's speech Doing a Job in all of the Boeing threads because he is just so relevant. Admiral Rickover was the man responsible for America having nuclear submarines. https://govleaders.org/rickover.htm
The speech is well worth a read in its entirety and it feels prescient in regards to Boeing. I think this paragraph more than any other hits at the core problem at Boeing:
> Unless the individual truly responsible can be identified when something goes wrong, no one has really been responsible. With the advent of modern management theories it is becoming common for organizations to deal with problems in a collective manner, by dividing programs into subprograms, with no one left responsible for the entire effort. There is also the tendency to establish more and more levels of management, on the theory that this gives better control. These are but different forms of shared responsibility, which easily lead to no one being responsible—a problems that often inheres in large corporations as well as in the Defense Department.
To contrast here is a statement from Calhoun: “We caused the problem. And we understand that. Over these last few weeks, I've had tough conversations with our customers, with our regulators, congressional leaders, and more. We understand why they are angry, and we will work to earn their confidence,” Calhoun said.
That we is him failing to take personal responsibility and choosing instead to spread responsibility to all employees, making no one responsible for the state of Boeing.
Boeing needs a leader who will take personal responsibility.
Unfortunately, the type of people who take personal responsibility for failures in organizations don’t end up climbing corporate ladders high enough to be considered for CEO positions. That’s just how large human groups work where contributions of each individual cannot be directly observed by everybody. Storytelling and making oneself look better start playing bigger role for promotions than actual results. Jeffrey Pfeffer writes in depth about it in his books about power.
I have been feeling cynical about the "blameless" culture seeping into entire organizations recently. At the end of some quarters where my team has fallen behind, I run away from the question of "who was really at fault here?". I probably should not do that...
> With the advent of modern management theories it is becoming common for organizations to deal with problems in a collective manner, by dividing programs into subprograms, with no one left responsible for the entire effort.
This is the tendency of all bureaucracies, everywhere, always. At least companies can be outcompeted - not so easy with governments.
It actually has become worse than that in many cases. Instead of being distributed to the collective "we", responsibility is often pushed down to the lower ranks in a systematic way.
A good example for this is Dieselgate, where management asked for "creativity" from James Liang and other engineers, knowing very well that they were driving their employees into muddy water without getting dirty themselves.
> When I came to Washington before World War II to head the electrical section of the Bureau of Ships, I found that one man was in charge of design, another of production, a third handled maintenance, while a fourth dealt with fiscal matters. The entire bureau operated that way. It didn’t make sense to me. Design problems showed up in production, production errors showed up in maintenance, and financial matters reached into all areas. I changed the system. I made one man responsible for his entire area of equipment—for design, production, maintenance, and contracting. If anything went wrong, I knew exactly at whom to point. I run my present organization on the same principle.
Rickover was apparently a fan of simple hierarchies. In contrast, Andy Grove like matrix organisation. From "High Output Management":
> It's not because Intel loved ambiguity that we became a hybrid organization. We have tried everything else, and while other models may have been less ambiguous, they simply didn't work. Hybrid organizations and the accompanying dual reporting principle, like a democracy, are not great in and of themselves. They just happen to be the best way for any business to be organized.
There’s also the question of where the rot really started.
I’d say that it goes back fairly far to the early 2000s or so when they should have had a development cadence like “widebody, narrowbody, widebody, narrowbody” because narrowbody is 80% of the market but instead it has been “widebody, widebody, widebody, widebody, yet another widebody”. Airbus and Boeing colluded to compete with one hand behind their backs in this time period which was profitable in the short term but would kill Boeing in the long term if it were not “too essential to national defense to fail” —- that is, with fly-by-wire and better geometry the A320 has more of a future (can even steal some of the widebody business) not the mention Airbus bought the A220 which is a next-generation narrowbody which was developed not by a big manufacturer but a small manufacturer backed by the Canadian government.
Try getting a flight in a modern narrowbody like the E2-Jet or A220 on an airline like Breeze and you will se that nobody would put up with riding in a 737 if they had a choice; even though that kind of plane is small on the outside it feels big on the outside, comfort is much more like a huge plane. It’s one of those things you have to fly to believe.
Personally, I think the issue isn't one of degrees or qualifications, but rather one of values.
The CEO prior to this one (Muilenburg) also had degrees in Aerospace Engineering, but chose to value profit maximization over things like security and a good engineering culture. Innocent people had to pay the price for it.
I personally don't see a big reason why the CEO of Boeing needs a Engineering degree. This seems to me to be a scapegoat, there are plenty of bad CEOs with Engineering degrees.
I'd argue that the COO or another position needs to have this qualification and have the power to bring up these risks to the CEO/Board. Someone needs to understanding engineering, be close to the ground but also have the power to bring things up to the CEO to make appropriate decisions.
If you had one, you would know how much you need to suffer to explain to non technical people why a development direction is better than another, and how much it will profit the company in the end.
It's depressing how quickly the move has been from thriving Republic to downfall with very little actual Empire in the middle. The Romans at least got to enjoy a couple hundred years of wine, revelry and decadence before things broke down completely.
CEOs don't like this fact, because it severely limits their career opportuninties.
In Italy we had Marchionne more or less an insurance salesman.
He lead FIAT group into oblivion, he tried to clear the books by simply canceling the development of a car model. Instead, he destroyed the company.
Engineering teaches problem-solving, critical thinking, and a systematic approach to addressing issues—all valuable in developing a strong security culture. A CEO who understands the technical intricacies of aircraft manufacturing is more likely to prioritize safety and security as non-negotiable aspects of the business model.
Just as a reminder, the former CEO, Dennis Muilenburg, likely responsible for this mess, does have a engineering background:
"He received a bachelor's degree in Aerospace Engineering from Iowa State University, followed by a master's degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics from the University of Washington."
The long time CEO of ASML, probably one of the most successful engineering companies of the last two decades, is an accountant by training. But if you hear him speak it's all about the quality of the product and delivering value to the customer. The CEO of Boeing should have his priorities right and be willing to listen to his engineers instead of maximizing profits by reducing cost. What he did in college is not that important in my opinion.
Instead they should not have an MBA or background in finance,
marketing, public relations, or any of those faux "professional"
skills that cause perfectly rational STEM thinkers to throw logic and
evidence to the crows and start toadying, bamboozling and
"compromising".
By all means hire and delegate to necessary specialists, accountants,
PR people etc. But do not head critical engineering missions with
people who've lost focus because they've been corrupted. Otherwise the
tail wags the dog.
You have to go back much further, to the late 90's. Because the problems in the industry takes a long time to surface. Muilenburg was a product of the deteriorated culture in Boeing and of course could not do anything but continue along the same path.
He inherited an already rotten corpse. It was McDonell Douglas MBAs that caused this in their ever lasting search for shareholder value above everything else. These processes take decades. Blaming the last CEO is a bit narrow minded.
One of the fine things in the Starship Troopers (the book) was that no one can become supreme commander without climbed high in both the army and the navy.
You have to know engineering so that engineers can't push you around and you have to know business side so that the bean counters can't push you around. But most important you have to have a person with the right values. Rigid quality control becoming the top priority right now. Also optimizations of the whole development process. Things right now are taking too much time and money.
Boeing needs to go through the reorg process NASA did after Challenger and Columbia. Identify the organizational causes and rework organizational incentives to prioritize safety culture. They've already had two fatal flights and several more serious incidents, it's past time they did this already.
All the big companies started with Engineers. It seems companies have a life-cycle. Engineers are at the kick off, growth stage. But later it is accountants or marketing that take lead and then it kind of goes into slow decline.
GaTech ChE here, married to a very successful GaTech ChE, been battling the financial efficiency wars for a quite a few decades: never met an engineer who couldn't be bought when the downside was (realistically, short term) job security. You get married to a company and job mobility is very constrained.
Credentials at the top don't mean that the process culture from the neck down isn't rotten.
I quit a cushy, maybe even a galactic set of Gubmint jobs when I was a young whippersnapper because I wanted to go to where the real work was getting done, in the F500 corporate world. Bell Labs, baby.
[+] [-] hayst4ck|2 years ago|reply
The speech is well worth a read in its entirety and it feels prescient in regards to Boeing. I think this paragraph more than any other hits at the core problem at Boeing:
> Unless the individual truly responsible can be identified when something goes wrong, no one has really been responsible. With the advent of modern management theories it is becoming common for organizations to deal with problems in a collective manner, by dividing programs into subprograms, with no one left responsible for the entire effort. There is also the tendency to establish more and more levels of management, on the theory that this gives better control. These are but different forms of shared responsibility, which easily lead to no one being responsible—a problems that often inheres in large corporations as well as in the Defense Department.
To contrast here is a statement from Calhoun: “We caused the problem. And we understand that. Over these last few weeks, I've had tough conversations with our customers, with our regulators, congressional leaders, and more. We understand why they are angry, and we will work to earn their confidence,” Calhoun said.
That we is him failing to take personal responsibility and choosing instead to spread responsibility to all employees, making no one responsible for the state of Boeing.
Boeing needs a leader who will take personal responsibility.
[+] [-] mikpanko|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yuppiepuppie|2 years ago|reply
I have been feeling cynical about the "blameless" culture seeping into entire organizations recently. At the end of some quarters where my team has fallen behind, I run away from the question of "who was really at fault here?". I probably should not do that...
[+] [-] MrBuddyCasino|2 years ago|reply
This is the tendency of all bureaucracies, everywhere, always. At least companies can be outcompeted - not so easy with governments.
[+] [-] weinzierl|2 years ago|reply
A good example for this is Dieselgate, where management asked for "creativity" from James Liang and other engineers, knowing very well that they were driving their employees into muddy water without getting dirty themselves.
[+] [-] se4u|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qznc|2 years ago|reply
Rickover was apparently a fan of simple hierarchies. In contrast, Andy Grove like matrix organisation. From "High Output Management":
> It's not because Intel loved ambiguity that we became a hybrid organization. We have tried everything else, and while other models may have been less ambiguous, they simply didn't work. Hybrid organizations and the accompanying dual reporting principle, like a democracy, are not great in and of themselves. They just happen to be the best way for any business to be organized.
[+] [-] PaulHoule|2 years ago|reply
I’d say that it goes back fairly far to the early 2000s or so when they should have had a development cadence like “widebody, narrowbody, widebody, narrowbody” because narrowbody is 80% of the market but instead it has been “widebody, widebody, widebody, widebody, yet another widebody”. Airbus and Boeing colluded to compete with one hand behind their backs in this time period which was profitable in the short term but would kill Boeing in the long term if it were not “too essential to national defense to fail” —- that is, with fly-by-wire and better geometry the A320 has more of a future (can even steal some of the widebody business) not the mention Airbus bought the A220 which is a next-generation narrowbody which was developed not by a big manufacturer but a small manufacturer backed by the Canadian government.
Try getting a flight in a modern narrowbody like the E2-Jet or A220 on an airline like Breeze and you will se that nobody would put up with riding in a 737 if they had a choice; even though that kind of plane is small on the outside it feels big on the outside, comfort is much more like a huge plane. It’s one of those things you have to fly to believe.
[+] [-] robertlagrant|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheHiddenSun|2 years ago|reply
He does not shy away from taking responsibility (and loudly boasting about it / taking credit on Twitter/x).
[+] [-] IshanMi|2 years ago|reply
The CEO prior to this one (Muilenburg) also had degrees in Aerospace Engineering, but chose to value profit maximization over things like security and a good engineering culture. Innocent people had to pay the price for it.
[+] [-] colinng|2 years ago|reply
https://www.boeing.com/company/bios/david-l-calhoun
> Calhoun has a bachelor’s degree in accounting from Virginia Tech.
[+] [-] mlrtime|2 years ago|reply
I'd argue that the COO or another position needs to have this qualification and have the power to bring up these risks to the CEO/Board. Someone needs to understanding engineering, be close to the ground but also have the power to bring things up to the CEO to make appropriate decisions.
[+] [-] _giorgio_|2 years ago|reply
If you had one, you would know how much you need to suffer to explain to non technical people why a development direction is better than another, and how much it will profit the company in the end.
[+] [-] dsq|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _giorgio_|2 years ago|reply
In Italy we had Marchionne more or less an insurance salesman. He lead FIAT group into oblivion, he tried to clear the books by simply canceling the development of a car model. Instead, he destroyed the company.
[+] [-] ponector|2 years ago|reply
Financial Times considered Marchionne as having been "one of the boldest business leaders of his generation".
[+] [-] isaacfrond|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pella|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] lukan|2 years ago|reply
"He received a bachelor's degree in Aerospace Engineering from Iowa State University, followed by a master's degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics from the University of Washington."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Muilenburg
So this alone is apparently not enough.
[+] [-] frodo8sam|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nonrandomstring|2 years ago|reply
Instead they should not have an MBA or background in finance, marketing, public relations, or any of those faux "professional" skills that cause perfectly rational STEM thinkers to throw logic and evidence to the crows and start toadying, bamboozling and "compromising".
By all means hire and delegate to necessary specialists, accountants, PR people etc. But do not head critical engineering missions with people who've lost focus because they've been corrupted. Otherwise the tail wags the dog.
[+] [-] fleischhauf|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hkon|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colinng|2 years ago|reply
https://www.boeing.com/company/bios/david-l-calhoun
> Calhoun has a bachelor’s degree in accounting from Virginia Tech.
[+] [-] dboreham|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bitcharmer|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ReptileMan|2 years ago|reply
You have to know engineering so that engineers can't push you around and you have to know business side so that the bean counters can't push you around. But most important you have to have a person with the right values. Rigid quality control becoming the top priority right now. Also optimizations of the whole development process. Things right now are taking too much time and money.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] SkyMarshal|2 years ago|reply
https://sma.nasa.gov/news/safety-messages/safety-message-ite...
[+] [-] lettergram|2 years ago|reply
Alternatively, is this a maintenance issue or a construction issue?
[+] [-] jmorenoamor|2 years ago|reply
Even if its knowledge is partially outdated due to switching to management at some point.
[+] [-] _heimdall|2 years ago|reply
It doesn't take an engineer to see they have safety issues worth fixing, and it doesn't take a CEO to fix them.
They just need a CEO with a better prioritization of safety versus profits/losses.
[+] [-] FrustratedMonky|2 years ago|reply
Andy Grove, Intel, comes to mind.
[+] [-] pi-err|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throw0101c|2 years ago|reply
https://archive.today/XEc8S
[+] [-] downut|2 years ago|reply
Credentials at the top don't mean that the process culture from the neck down isn't rotten.
I quit a cushy, maybe even a galactic set of Gubmint jobs when I was a young whippersnapper because I wanted to go to where the real work was getting done, in the F500 corporate world. Bell Labs, baby.
Hahahahahaha.
[+] [-] ChrisArchitect|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]