When you waste money on DEI you have to cut corners elsewhere.
Speaking of cutting corners, why does this article read like it was written by the same “AI” they used to program the 737s?
Has anyone seen the video of the fat women in the matching shirts (I think it was Boeing!) at a trade show dancing to some song to demonstrate their diversity? I can’t find it for the life of me.
But those offshored Indian software developers are so cheap! Only $9 per hour. How can we pass up a savings like that?
Let's give ourselves another executive bonus for meeting cost reduction goals.
-Boeing executive management team.
Yes.
Many people can create some software, which would work “usually”.
In my experience, beginners do not consider all “what ifs” and just shoot something, “well enough”.
It take highly paid, well experienced engineers to make it work ALL the time!
Yep.
“When you waste money on DEI you have to cut corners elsewhere.”
Not only DEI.
1) Obscenely paid executive positions and consulting deals for retired generals, politicians and bureaucrats who steered contracts to Boeing during their government careers.
2). Lucrative executive bonuses and stock option packages rewarding the cost cutting, DEI programs, and financial engineering
3). Over $68 billion for stock buybacks, instead of investing in the business, to pump the value of the stock price thereby increasing the value of executive stock options. https://www.commondreams.org/news/boeing-mass-layoffs
4). Untold tens of millions of dollars spent moving the corporate headquarters first from Washington state to Chicago and then to DC.
Boeing is another example of a US company where financial manipulators and attorneys wrested control of the corporation from the executives who knew how to design, make and sell products. The primary focus of these corporations is financial engineering to please Wall Street speculators, and maximize executive stock option compensation, not building innovative and safe aircraft. Once the finance people take over a corporation, making and selling great products becomes incidental to manipulating earnings to drive the stock price.
When a company spends billions on stock buybacks, instead of new product innovation, manufacturing quality enhancements, worker training, and modernizing production facilities, you know it is in the death spiral.
In 1974 Sears Roebuck was the largest retailer in the US and was respected by customers for its quality brands (Kenmore, Craftsman, DieHard, Weatherbeater). In 1974 Sears completed construction of the then world’s tallest building, the Sears Tower, to serve as its corporate headquarters. Its catalog operation was the Amazon of its day and notably was shut down by the financial executives at the company the same year Amazon was founded. If Sears had been run by visionary merchants, instead of financial manipulators, the catalog operation gave it the potential to dominate internet shopping. Instead, during the past 50 years Sears has been through bankruptcy and constant downsizing to where today it operates only 11 stores and those will be gone within the next two years. Over a 50 year period Sears was milked and gutted by financial geniuses who knew nothing about products, little about store operation, did not care about customers, and who refused to invest money in sustaining and growing the business.
Harvard and Wharton Ivy League business school financial MBA’s have dominated the executive suites of American companies for 50 years and have willingly sold off American’s manufacturing supply chains to foreign companies, making themselves multimillionaires through executive compensation plans rewarding the sell-off of assets and the temporary margin improvement from outsourcing. As long as the the financial executives , and lawyers, are running US corporations, returning manufacturing to the USA will only be empty words uttered by politicians to secure votes in election years.
DEI is only a minor part of the leadership problem in US industry. Until product visionaries and operations experts once again dominate executive suites and corporate boardrooms, once great US corporations will continue to fail, to shrink, and lobby for government subsidies and preferences.
As the 20th century began, America had eclipsed the British Empire as the greatest industrial power on the planet. Wall Street was ruled by the banker J.P. Morgan who financed factories, equipment, ships, railroads and other projects which would propel US industry through the first half of the 20th century and create a manufacturing infrastructure capable of producing the materials required to fight a world war. Today’s investment bankers and stock traders churn billions of dollars of securities in nanoseconds seeking to create opportunity to make a quick buck with the aid of computers as and artificial intelligences. This speculative trading, much of it done with the retirement savings (IRA, 401K) of average Americans, as well as pension money, creates no factories, transportation networks, or other “hard” assets which can be used by creative and industrious people to make products and create jobs. Instead it lines the pockets of billionaires and flows to politicians who rig the game for their benefactors.
In many ways DEI is a distraction in the big picture. Eliminating DEI will not result in the relocation of one factory from China or Vietnam to the USA. Reshoring manufacturing, and making American industry great again, will require a seismic shift in types of people reaching leadership positions in corporations, corporate executive compensation systems, a long term investment mentality, and the nurturing of visionary creative minds (Steve Jobs, Elon Musk) capable of imagining great products and entire new businesses.