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When things go wrong for Western companies people absolutely do blame it on cultural factors, yes. Beancounters, pressure on quarterly earnings from Wall St, to
by gaius 9y ago
When things go wrong for Western companies people absolutely do blame it on cultural factors, yes. Beancounters, pressure on quarterly earnings from Wall St, to name a couple of examples. SpaceX through the sheer force of Elon's will has kept some of this at bay, but he won't be able to forever, and the cold winds are already blowing at Tesla.
- QAPereo 9y ago"Through sheer force of Elon's will..." you don't really believe a word of that, right?
- gaius 9y agoWhy not? A charismatic CEO can get away with a lot, in terms of investors giving them more leeway. Sometimes this is good, like Steve Jobs, sometimes it is bad, like Elizabeth Holmes. Eventually tho' SpaceX will be as constrained by demands for quarterly earnings figures to start making bad, short-term decisions, just the same as most Western corporations.
- jccooper 9y agoOnly if it's Musk demanding quarterly earnings figures. SpaceX is privately held, with overwhelming control by Elon himself, and much of the rest by his friends. While eventually he might be diluted out of control by (very large amounts of) additional investment, that's not going to happen any time soon, and is predicated on being significantly unprofitable for a long time.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- krapp 9y agoI'm not certain technical deficiency or lack of sophistication are valid cultural factors to criticize in the case of India's space program. Having the latter implies the former aren't really issues.
- gaius 9y agoIt wasn't technical deficiencies that killed the UK space programme, was it? Or was it?