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In a way, Boeing’s plight underlines American work culture vs. European and other relaxed but stringent work cultures. American businesses are constantly churn
by ameen 7y ago
In a way, Boeing’s plight underlines American work culture vs. European and other relaxed but stringent work cultures.
American businesses are constantly churning output with not much to show for (relative to effort vs results) as the employees are burned out, investors and C-suite demand more of the middle-management and they in-turn pressure engineering and sales teams, etc.
The results have spoken about which one works and which doesn’t. Toxic work culture starts from the top.
- ramblerman 7y agoI think the results have shown not all industries benefit from being purely profit driven. To extrapolate that further is a bit disingenuous. The US is still a leader in innovation over Europe, by a large margin. And I say that as a European.
- Ragnarork 7y agoHow do you measure "innovation" though? Is it in terms of patents, in terms of the number of new companies, new companies that succeed (and according to which metrics?), new companies using/developing new technologies? Do you consider modern implementations of old concepts as innovation or not (i.e. transitioning some activities into the digital world, that kind of things)? Do you normalize that "innovation" quantity with how much money is injected into the "innovation industry"?
- jiqiren 7y agoyes.
- datenhorst 7y agoI believe Harvard Business School and its ilk deserve a lot of blame for the instilling of a profit-at-any-cost culture across the US.
- strictfp 7y agoIMO the business school of though is the one which is currently hindering progression, holding on to values from the industrial revolution. It's as we all know a philosophy of top-down management of expendible resources. This way of thinking simply doesn't apply today. We need a breakthrough of the servant leadership way of thinking.
- neuronic 7y agoI studied abroad in the US as a European and the first sentence the microeconomics professor blurts out: "Greed is good." At that point I wasn't as gobsmacked anymore because several days before some 17 year old girl yelled in a 300 person biology lecture at the professor to stop telling lies about evolution (first week of college). But "greed is good" struck me as an oddly American way of viewing the world. Europe isn't free of greedy people, by any means, but it's sort of not the first rule you learn in school.
- msiemens 7y agoI guess it depends. I have a German engineering degree and took a business administration course as a part of that. And in one of the first lectures our professor told us that The formal goal of the company is to maximize profit. Which seems to be just a more formal way of expressing Greed is good. But then again, this might be influenced by American business culture…
- neuronic 7y agoAgreed, and I obviously suffer from some bias since I could not experience college in both countries. But the microeconomics angle seemed more personal - as in attempting to describe interaction between people with some extrapolation to larger entities.