Posted on 04/22/2024 3:42:42 PM PDT by yldstrk
he sight of Bill Boeing was a familiar one on the factory floor. His office was in the building next to the converted boatyard where workers lathed the wood, sewed the fabric wings, and fixed the control wires of the Boeing Model C airplane. there is no authority except facts. facts are obtained by accurate observation read a plaque affixed outside the door. And what could need closer observation than the process of his aircraft being built? One day in 1916, Boeing spotted an imperfectly cut wing rib, dropped it to the floor, and slowly stomped it to bits. “I, for one, will close up shop rather than send out work of this kind,” he declared.
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
If the managerial bureaucrats in the other departments were to earn their keep, they needed a thorough understanding of the shop floor, or gemba (roughly “place of making value”). The so-called Gemba Walk required their routine presence at each step until they could comprehend the assembly of the whole. Otherwise they risked becoming muda—waste.
Unionization never happened.
Excellent article - and we can thank our Labor UNIONS for Boeing wanting nothing to do with that bunch.
Mad Magazine Proudly salutes American industry...June 1972, issue 151. a personal fav IN ‘72! Dei, equal opportunity or whatever the term du jour is didn’t just happen overnight. a good friend summed up perfectly what the major problem in these United States of America is in One Word over 40 years ago...Mediocrity. there are still some who choose to try to be their very best but mostly very few even try to be outstanding in their field. except maybe those who ARE standing in their field. like farmers. most just want to be adequate but either can’t or won’t push the proverbial envelope to be better. society today seems to wants everyone to strive for mediocrity so the slackers and less bright don’t have to work so hard. don’t believe me, just look around.
In the 80s a well known aviation components manufacturing company moved where I am from South Bend Indiana to escape collective bargaining units to have non union employees......they hired all new blue collar workers including myself and made it very clear if the workers attempted to unionize they would relocate again no problem......after 5 years some idiot employees decided to challenge that edict.....2 years later they consolidated our plant with another facility in N.C.
IMO unions are an outdated concept that can’t survive in an ever increasingly competitive world......auto makers are a great example of that.
We will produce nothing.
Good article.
The outsourcing mentality has hurt the US auto companies as well.
In their case it is just unreliable crap that coasts to the side of the road.
Not crash and die.
“you will have nothing, produce nothing, and eat nothing...and you WILL be happy!” is the mantra of our glorious leaders. signed: Acting Happy.
Boeing became our only remaining airliner manufacturer as the rest fell by the wayside. It has had a magnificent run with world-class and safe aircraft. Its only major competition has been Airbus and they are heavily subsidized by its European consortium - which pushed Boeing to start acting like any other company run by MBAs instead of airplane people. Now people have been killed and there have been a bunch of near-misses.
Does Boeing resume what made it the best for decades, or do they keep hiring bean counters?
I liked that article too - amazing piece that pretty well sums up what went wrong: the culture that searches for generic CEOs and other upper management positions just because they did OK in other unrelated fields. The whole corporate culture is driven towards maximizing shareholder dividends - which is not a good fit for aircraft manufacturers or any other business that has make quality its first and highest priority (ask Colt ‘s Firearms).
Boeing became our only remaining airliner manufacturer as the rest fell by the wayside. It has had a magnificent run with world-class and safe aircraft. Its only major competition has been Airbus and they are heavily subsidized by its European consortium - which pushed Boeing to start acting like any other company run by MBAs instead of airplane people. Now people have been killed and there have been a bunch of near-misses.
Does Boeing resume what made it the best for decades, or do they keep hiring bean counters?
11 posted on 4/22/2024, 5:07:57 PM by Chainmail
What happened over the last 60 or so years is companies like Ford and GM went from making cars to making money in the short term.
Instead of thinking about the next decade, it is the next quarter. That leads things like planes falling out of sky and bridges falling down
It’s a tactic that the system incentivizes and a flaw.
Mediocrity slowly became ingrained in American culture as the link between financial compensation and productive human activity was broken.
Once we got to the point where people can "earn" more money on welfare than they can by working, it is only a matter of time before the pillars of our civilization will be crumbling.
The absolutely disgraceful low point of the U.S. auto industry was the period of time between the end of the post-WW2 recovery and the rise of Asian auto manufacturers.
Go back and read about what was happening at "Big Three" plants in the U.S. from the late 1960s through the mid-1980s. The only thing that saved these companies was a swift kick in the ass from Japanese competitors like Toyota and Honda.
Oh, and as an engineer in manufacturing. Jack Welch should have been hung.
His apostles have destroyed countless companies.
Engineers were replaced with bean counters in the boardroom.
“The absolutely disgraceful low point of the U.S. auto industry was the period of time between the end of the post-WW2 recovery and the rise of Asian auto manufacturers. “
Are you talking about the quality levels of the cars, or the sales and profit levels of the companies ?
Last Ford Rolls off Line at Mahwah Plant
The article makes a vague reference to quality issues at the plant, but the details have been documented elsewhere. By the time that plant was shut down, it consistently had the worst quality control metrics of any plant Ford operated anywhere.
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