Posted on 04/14/2024 10:05:35 PM PDT by Chad C. Mulligan
John Barnett had one of those bosses who seemed to spend most of his waking hours scheming to inflict humiliation upon him. He mocked him in weekly meetings whenever he dared contribute a thought, assigned a fellow manager to spy on him and spread rumors that he did not play nicely with others, and disciplined him for things like “using email to communicate” and pushing for flaws he found on planes to be fixed.
“John is very knowledgeable almost to a fault, as it gets in the way at times when issues arise,” the boss wrote in one of his withering performance reviews, downgrading Barnett’s rating from a 40 all the way to a 15 in an assessment that cast the 26-year quality manager, who was known as “Swampy” for his easy Louisiana drawl, as an anal-retentive prick whose pedantry was antagonizing his colleagues. The truth, by contrast, was self-evident to anyone who spent five minutes in his presence: John Barnett, who raced cars in his spare time and seemed “high on life” according to one former colleague, was a “great, fun boss that loved Boeing and was willing to share his knowledge with everyone,” as one of his former quality technicians would later recall. But Swampy was mired in an institution that was in a perpetual state of unlearning all the lessons it had absorbed over a 90-year ascent to the pinnacle of global manufacturing. Like most neoliberal institutions, Boeing had come under the spell of a seductive new theory of “knowledge” that essentially reduced the whole concept to a combination of intellectual property, trade secrets, and data, discarding “thought” and “understanding” and “complex reasoning” possessed by a skilled and experienced workforce as essentially not worth the increased health care costs.
(Excerpt) Read more at prospect.org ...
Ayn Rand is having an “I TOLD You So” moment right about now...
The thing with MBA managers is the see their compensation terms incentivize short-term profits.
The game then becomes to get your stock options, cash out, and move on before your short-term thinking becomes evident.
Meanwhile, companies run by owners/founders have much more long range planning.
I was once at a place with a lot of turnover. The executive thinking became “why should I invest resources into something which only my successor will benefit from?”
Yeah, I remember the time I brought some bad news to the program manager, suggesting that a scheduled delivery could very well be a disaster, advocating for a minor slip to give full confidence in the testing. I was thoroughly reamed by a lower lever manager for not supporting him and the team. The delivery was right on time and as I feared, it was a failure and an embarrassment to all involved. Did anyone apologize to me? Of course not.
Lockheed Missiles and Space Company in Sunnyvale, CA in the ‘80s and ‘90s had the same infestation of “bean counters”.
Glad I am retired!
If the MBA managers actually have experience on the line or have their hands dirty from knowing how the products they make actually work, they are not qualified to be running anything.
Steve Jobs was there from the beginning of Apple and knew how the machines actually worked and how people use them, the guy who replaced was selling Pepsi and probably had little to no experience of how computers work and how people use them on a daily basis, the results speak for themselves.
GE, HP, and many other technology companies have gone thru the same thing, the one thing that separates Boeing from these other companies, is when one of Boeing’s products fail people die.
Mr. GG2 spent 7 years with Boeing in Everett. He got slapped down a couple of times for pointing out problems management didn’t want to hear. He also designed and made a tool to install some difficult part. When he was laid off he planned to patent the tool for sale. Boeing told him it was theirs since he made it with materials at work so on his last day he took a hack saw and cut it up into pieces and threw it in a garbage can.
“My outsider’s perspective is that Boeing has devoted more resources to buying politicians than to building good aircraft.”
That’s probably why their current headquarters is in Arlington, VA. More convenient to DC and the Pentagon.
just tighten every other bolt and you cut production time in half!! a monkey can use a torque wrench, We can hire someone for minimum wage to torque them post production..
we found plastic parts that are an exact fit that are 1/3 the price of aluminum..
and, NO paid overtime. if you cant get the job done in 8 hours we'll hire someone who will. All true!
DEI?
Go woke...go broke! DEI = DIE in constructing airplanes.
I did/do. A colleague of mine was posted to run a branch factory for the company in China, because that was required to get any access at all to the China market. One thing he remarked on after his return was the monumentally pervasive corruption. His final comment was that in Chinese there is not even a word for ethics. (Apparently that's a Christian concept.)
But there is hope, because the Russians at least have proven over the last 3 years to be even more corrupt and incompetent than we are. China is also very corrupt, but as for military competence we have no data. Yet.
Someone needs to go and it isn’t the guy who knows his stuff. It’s the
supervisor.
Build to spec or beyond.
Sounds like a stressful position. Thanks for the mention.
Old white guys replaced by the offspring of migrant invader vermin and DEI policies...
Boeing’s Downfall - Before the McDonnell Douglas Merger
“Boeing today seems to be going from crisis to crisis, with its reputation in tatters and the press and much of the public reacting any time something happens to a Boeing aircraft – even if one of the pilots just SNEEZES wrongly.
But HOW or WHY did we get here? How did Boeing, a gem of a company, that was once the Gold Standard of aviation engineering, end up with their name getting dragged through the mud this way? And more specifically, what role did Boeing’s merger with McDonnell Douglas have, in making this happen?
Today I’m starting a series on… Boeing’s fall from grace. And in this episode, I will set the stage by taking a look at the history of Boeing and McDonnell Douglas, to show how different these giants were, as they headed to a “wedding” that many now wish had never happened.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ym41Iz68j4s
Sounds very interesting...
Looking forward to it...
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.