Why Boeing needs to be run by engineers and not bean counters
Really insightful video about what has gone wrong.
Among the points Casey makes is that Boeing imported Jack Welch's GE management culture.
This has included a focus on short-term profits over engineering, and practises such as stack ranking.
Boeing, as a major defence contractor and (direct and indirect) employer, is too big to fail.
And Casey argues that either the Board or, if they're unwilling, the US government, needs to clear out the senior management and introduce an engineer-led management team:
I’ve never met anyone who likes touch screens in cars. They force you to take your eyes off the road, and they often activate because of weather or bumpy roads. The only reason we have them is that a touch screen is cheaper than old fashioned knobs.
I wouldn’t say corrupted, as much as “oh I need this job and I can’t give it up”. I’m probably not the only engineer in this community who’s living paycheck to paycheck. Old parents and a really high mortgage lol.
It doesn’t have to be fair, but that is one of the reasons that corruption can be so difficult to deal with, because financially stressed individuals are highly vulnerable. Corruption isn’t turning into some cartoon villain, but rather it’s exactly that sort of “look the other way” for a couple bucks, repeated many times, which allows them to operate within known and mapped corrupt organizations. It’s just one more reason that charity has been a cornerstone of western civilization, because people are a lot harder to corrupt if they can count on their communities to help them in the event everything else goes wrong.
This is true for EVERY industry. Ever wonder why there’s not much local investigative journalism anymore? Because news people don’t run news stations. Wonder why it’s mostly sequels in video games and movies? Because game designers and directors/writers don’t run those studios. Wonder why medicine costs so much? Or why food sizes are shrinking? Or ……
Capitalism is about unrestricted access to economic activity for everyone. What we have currently is regulatory capture. Unfortunately we haven’t devised any economic system yet which can withstand the test of time. Even the founding fathers knew when they created America that it would definitely be corrupted eventually.
Amen to that. Bean counters and MBAs (yeah, I know, I’m repeating myself) ruin everything they touch, blindly chasing constant rapid growth. But the line DOESN’T have to keep going up forever. I wish more companies operated based on that premise. You DON’T need to monopolize the market, you DON’T need to exceed your quarterly profits every single quarter until the heat death of the universe, there IS such thing as enough money…
I wish I lived in a world like that. It might be slightly less convenient, maybe with slightly fewer choices, but I think it would be a much happier place.
From what I’ve always been told, it was run by engineers before the McDonnell Douglas merger, which was when the military-industrial complex bean counters took over.
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