bttt
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.
Organizations don't know and remember things. People do. I think it is still that way. A google answer is just window dressing without experience or understanding. Maybe just a good starting place but somebody still has to do the work.
Yeah, a metaphor for America where nobody is responsible and nobody ever did anything wrong.
Airbus will be idling hundreds of planes for years to come over an engine flaw.
One stock is up 25%, the other stock is down 25% which is an absurd outcome.
Boeing is on my buy list on the next big market pullback.
We got tired of their new “bean counting “ BS and retired or went elsewhere.
I spent over twenty years at Boeing, as did many of my family.
We just got tired of “Bean counters” telling us how to build airplanes. Engineers, technicians, and skilled machinists build airplanes. Politics and “Bean counters” do not.
Indeed.
“...It made him sick to think that the value of his Boeing shares had tripled over the same period during which he’d watched the company get so comprehensively dismantled. But it was downright surreal to watch the stock price nearly triple once more during the two years after he left the company.”
These managers act like they do because it works in the short, and even medium term.
The corporate executives who had stock options when the stock did 9X made tens and maybe hundreds of millions of dollars.
If they don’t care about running the company into the ground and making unsafe planes, its worth it to them.
Until they get better people in charge or change the financial incentive structure. so that short term decisions get penalized, it will not change.
Boeing won’t fail. It is too systematically important and will be bailed out.
Gov’t can’t fix it. I will just impose more Wokeness to go along with shoddy design, assembly and inspection.
all I know is I trust the guys with work boots on and some brain cells ....you know,the guys who can figure out problems....
Bttt
I’ve seen it in my own industry. Senior, experienced people run out by incompetent bean counters, only to see their divisions collapse as clients leave.
In one of my prior companies, I had doubled our client base in 4 years. Then, I had to take a step back because my middle child was battling an incurable condition. The next leader blew the division apart in a year. Staff churn, clients running for the door, because they were a condescending jerk to my team members.
I took a job at a high rise and spent the first year cleaning the place up. When I left a few years later for an executive level position, the next crew ran the place into the ground in just 8 months before they were fired. The building tracked me down and came to my new company.
Thankfully, I am with a company that values exceptionalism, invests heavily in training our people to be the best, and appreciates experience. After substantially increasing their bottom line, they give me broad latitude to train newbies. My original training program was 26 weeks (expanded to 30 as I added more modules) and I run it year round. The people that started with me have gone on to become directors and senior leaders in other organizations and won awards in our industry.
It almost happened to my present company. When the founder decided to retire, the company that bought his company brought in ivy league people that didn’t understand our business model at all. They ran off the knowledgeable folks, demanded a new software platform with a massive conversion during the busiest season of the year, stretched staff to the breaking point, and more. I came aboard after the dust had settled and the Ivys were replaced by leaders from within the industry. There was still a lot of clean up to do.
MacNamara’s whiz kids all over again.
I don’t want to fly anymore... Thanks alot Boeing.
I observed this organizational disfunction when I was a university professor. The first sign was decisions by committee rather than holding an individual responsible. I got tired of all the wasted time in committee meetings.
Since all faculty were equal, the liberal arts professors got the same pay as the science professors that were in high demand. The national average starting or entry level pay for computer science professors was far higher than a full tenured professor could get at our university, thanks to equality in the union contract.
Thus, the flat pay scale meant that the most they would pay computer science professors that were in high demand was the same as the liberal arts. They could only hire the bottom of the barrel professors that were often rejected for tenure and dismissed from other universities.
Entire departments would only hire people from their own special interest group. The philosophy department became composed of all lesbians. The psych department became composed of all dykes.
As these special interest groups rose to management positions, the university became chaos as academic performance was no longer a criteria for student admission. Race, country of origen, and the special interest group of the day became priority.
I found many students in my classes that could not read, or write simple sentences. And, English was there first and only language.
The students found that by claiming test anxiety, they would get double the time to take an exam while normal students would only get the regular class period. The pressure to pass these non functioning students became great.
Then, they forced the business department to get accreditation which meant that all the professors with doctorates in education and were excellent teachers, hadd to be replaced with PhD in business as the education degrees did not count for accreditation. This forced the university to hire bottom of the barrel PhDs that were in very high demand.
The university became woke and I left. I loved teaching, but the organization became disfunctional.
This is deliberate destruction of the reliability of our
aircraft. I’d term this treason, because this will bleed
out into our military aircraft at some point.
This guy should be locked up, and the key tossed down a big
deep dark hole.
Articles like this help confirm what I’ve been hearing that if a worker is there to build safe and reliable planes, they’re in the wrong place.
Very likely close to retirement and pension and biding their time just listening to and doing what inept management says to do.
Once again, why are we tolerating this BS?
Bfl
IOW it can’t be a metaphor for much of the planet as much of the planet has miles to reach American efficiency.
Hate may not be anyone’s game but Boeing’s failure to properly design the Max sure brings out a ton of hate America nonsense.
Since libsomething makes it a point 5-10 times a week to chronicle Boeing’s failure to properly design a plane-
voila anti American hate 5-10 times a week like religion.