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From the article: Mr. Cooper didn’t send or receive the messages, the latest batch of which Boeing disclosed to lawmakers and the news media in January, this p

From the article: Mr. Cooper didn’t send or receive the messages, the latest batch of which Boeing disclosed to lawmakers and the news media in January, this person said. Those messages show Boeing employees mocking airline officials, aviation regulators and even their own colleagues. In one, an employee said the 737 MAX had been “designed by clowns, who in turn are supervised by monkeys.” Boeing Chief Executive David Calhoun, who has called the messages “totally appalling,” has said he aimed to stamp out such behavior and hold managers accountable. “Awareness in the leadership ranks around whether that’s happening or not is not an excuse if it’s happening,” Mr. Calhoun said in a call with reporters in January, shortly after taking over as CEO. “Disciplinary actions have to be taken.” --- To summarize: They fired a guy for not knowing about emails he did not send or receive where engineers were voicing their internal concerns that the 737 MAX design was lacking. Boeing's take away wasn't, "People knew something was wrong and didn't have a way to properly voice that concern." Boeing's take away was, "Middle management should have sufficiently threatened those under their supervision into self-censoring their concerns." Seems like a super-healthy corporate culture that would simultaneously be a fun place to work and produce the best products /s

Mirioron 7y ago
This kind of an article sounds incredibly damning to me. It indicates that Boeing is essentially rotten on the inside and that anybody doing business with them should be wary.
- HarryHirsch 7y ago
  Perhaps related: https://orgprepdaily.wordpress.com/2007/04/22/on-keeping-your-soul https://orgprepdaily.wordpress.com/2007/04/22/on-keeping-you... This is a chemist's view from the trenches. A manager who hasn't been brought up in the engineering mindset wouldn't even be able to understand any of the points in that blogpost, which partially explains the trouble that pharmaceutical companies are finding themselves in. You cannot bribe or cheat observable reality.
  - lutorm 7y ago
    As an engineer, I sort of disagree with this. Doing a shoddy job and trying to get away with it is inexcusable, but "good enough" is the gold standard in engineering. No one is helped by spending development time and money by making things better than they have to be. Sometimes you have to go with a less capable result because the alternative will take too long or cost too much to develop, or (since we're talking aerospace here) weigh too much. The trick, of course, is to know exactly how good is enough.
    - onceUponADime 7y ago
      There are some companys who manage it though, by basically getting bi-furicated intwo two seperat internal divisions competing against one another. Basically if you have a safe seat- or monopoly, you must learn to play catch against yourself or else.. boing, and important parts go flying.
      - pkaye 7y ago
        > There are some companys who manage it though, by basically getting bi-furicated intwo two seperat internal divisions competing against one another. Sometimes that competing becomes backstabbing between the divisions.
        sct202 7y ago
        And then the company falls apart when you get a real competitor and the divisions are too busy attacking each other.
        thombat 7y ago
        And Nokia was one such company, in the latter days of S60 smartphones. One (of many) re-orgs produced three main phone divisions called something like: entertainment, executive, and enterprise, with high-level features partitioned between them [1]. So "entertainment" gets the high-quality auto-focus camera because that's great for blogging hipsters, and "executive" gets the barcode reading software so suits can scan the QR codes on business cards [2] ... except they couldn't because without a decent auto-focus camera the QR code needed to be printed on A3 paper and stuck on the wall to be scanable. Yes, this was discovered in internal testing. Yes, it shipped anyway. Down in the trenches we made bitter jokes about "three bald men fighting over a comb" as we watched our Lords and Masters engage with the looming competition by making snide public remarks about "that fruit company", having long before killed the touchscreen prototypes. But at least Boeing would have handled this situation differently: we'd have been fired for those jokes. [1] and what if you're an "executive" working in an "enterprise" who likes to kick back with some "entertainment" on the commute? KA-CHING! you're gonna buy three Nokia phones! Or zero, more likely. [2] that was seriously advanced as a leading use case. Quite probably by an in-house futurist.
- kaonashi 7y ago
  Good article on the subject: https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/the-coming-boeing-bailout https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/the-coming-boeing-bailout
- toohotatopic 7y ago
  >Boeing, one of the US’s largest and most important companies, acquired its longtime plane manufacturer rival, McDonnell Douglas, in what was then the country’s tenth-largest merger. >The resulting giant took Boeing’s name. More unexpectedly, it took its culture and strategy from McDonnell Douglas https://www.msn.com/en-za/money/news/how-the-mcdonnell-douglas-boeing-merger-led-to-the-737-max-crisis/ar-BBYzJXz https://www.msn.com/en-za/money/news/how-the-mcdonnell-dougl...
  - AlexCoventry 7y ago
    Great article. It's an interesting framing, that Boeing's woes stem from a shift from "great engineering firm protected by airlines' government-mandated monopolies" to "lean engine of capitalism." The story about McDonnell-Douglas doing much better out of the merger than you would expect for the junior partner is interesting, too. It would be fascinating to read more about howthat happened.
- afterburner 7y ago
  Welcome to any large company that's been around for a while. Especially successful ones.
  - vsareto 7y ago
    And especially ones who bid on US government contracts
- xiphias2 7y ago
  Isn't that the main reason why people from governments want to do business with them? If a company is not corrupt, it's not able to backchannel a big part of the money.
- Phrenzy 7y ago
  I was working as a contractor at Boeing for 2 years. None of this surprises me.
uxp100 7y ago
Yeah. As the company, you don't want emails like that coming out, but getting rid of messages like that damages the so called safety culture. I think a good answer as a CEO would be to tell managers to be more careful in emails, but no real punishment. However, the criticism in the emails was pretty low content, it's not like this was a message that said, man those monkeys really screwed up the MCAS or something. I think you might see messages like that even on well designed products, people get frustrated.
- at-fates-hands 7y ago
  >> Yeah. As the company, you don't want emails like that coming out Which, honestly shocked me they were sending emails like that in the first place. Talk among yourselves at the lunch table, complain in private and try to talk to someone in management who will listen. It was 2018 for god's sake. Do these engineers still not know how stupid it is to be sending emails like that around the company? Maybe it just highlights how out of touch the culture was there to begin with? It just seems reckless and these people should be smart enough to know better.
  - HarryHirsch 7y ago
    But the emails ("designed by clowns", "wouldn't put my family on it") are just the symptom. Even if the whole engineering division had kept its mouth firmly shut the aircraft would still have been designed by clowns, and no one's family should be put on it. This is shared reality. The goal should be to prevent such commentary by picking up on well-founded engineering concerns before management commits to building a product that is not viable because it cannot perform.
  - xoa 7y ago
    >Do these engineers still not know how stupid it is to be sending emails like that around the company? I've started to wonder over the past few years myself: maybe in some cases they very much do, and it's not stupid at all? If you know such emails may come out in case of trouble, then it can in turn become a tool for a low level of whistleblowing/accountability in a hard situation. A lot of us are fortunate enough to not be placed in professional/personal situations where we'd see something with life-safety consequences and not be able to blow the whistle or feel comfortable walking away. But what if one were, or what if the situation is genuinely gray? Like, you get the feeling something may be off the tracks in process, and your management chain/reporting processes aren't responsive, but it's not actually at all clear from your level that it's really important. Maybe it's just you. Sending a "private" email with your concerns to a coworker over official email might be then be a good way to bookmark that. If nothing ever happens it'll forever remain an undiscovered internal email. But if things ever go so wrong that the company actually faces subpoenas from the government over it than there will be a record. I mean, what you're saying seems to imply that the engineers should have been concerned about keeping Boeing's bad behavior private right? Well, should they? Yeah the company under its modern McDonnell Douglas leadership certainly doesn't want emails like that coming out following the deaths of hundreds of people due to a bunch of company blunders. But I don't think it follows that engineers shouldn't want emails like that coming out. If they're angry enough, they may even actively want such emails to reveal exactly how bad things had gotten internally, in ways that really would embarrass leadership in a newspaper headline or Congressional hearing.
cipher_system 7y ago
By being part of the leadership ranks and being unaware, shouldn't the disciplinary actions extend upon himself as well? Maybe being a total dick gives you a free pass at Boeing.
- leroy_masochist 7y ago
  The current CEO, Calhoun, took over a month ago after his predecessor, Muilenberg, was fired for the exact reason you just mentioned
  - lutorm 7y ago
    He was always on the Board, though.
asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
Seems like there are two possible takeaways. One is the one you called out. The other is to escalate issues your reports raise to you. "My pilots think this plane is trash. I better tell my boss." He could have taken either route and been safe at least from being canned. Boeing seems to be publicly expecting everyone to take the second approach.
- bilbo0s 7y ago
  >He could have taken either route and been safe at least from being canned. I don't know? Unless I'm misunderstanding the story, I'm not sure the guy they fired could have escalated issues he was not informed of? I suppose we could assume that he was informed of the issues, just not via any documented method? But based only on the information given in the article, I'm just not sure how someone not even in the loop on an issue, can reasonably be expected to escalate that issue? Maybe I'm misapprehending the article?
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
    No, you've got it right. I missed the negation on him receiving the messages. In that case, his firing is incomprehensible, at least if this is the sole cause.
mfoy_ 7y ago
An alternative take is that they just sacked one of the "monkeys". ;)
mc32 7y ago
Yeah that’s not a positive conclusion to come to in light of what their internal lack of negative feedback loops resulted in. They should instead promote a system that discovers the clowns-and-monkeys comments in order to address the concerns revealed by the comments rather than attempt to stamp out the only negative feedback loop they had. Instead they seem to have hired another “monkey” for CEO. Hope they hire a better person before even more damage to corporate culture happens.
LoSboccacc 7y ago
"the beatings will continue until morale improves"
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

Mirioron 7y ago

This kind of an article sounds incredibly damning to me. It indicates that Boeing is essentially rotten on the inside and that anybody doing business with them should be wary.

HarryHirsch 7y ago
Perhaps related: https://orgprepdaily.wordpress.com/2007/04/22/on-keeping-your-soul https://orgprepdaily.wordpress.com/2007/04/22/on-keeping-you... This is a chemist's view from the trenches. A manager who hasn't been brought up in the engineering mindset wouldn't even be able to understand any of the points in that blogpost, which partially explains the trouble that pharmaceutical companies are finding themselves in. You cannot bribe or cheat observable reality.
- lutorm 7y ago
  As an engineer, I sort of disagree with this. Doing a shoddy job and trying to get away with it is inexcusable, but "good enough" is the gold standard in engineering. No one is helped by spending development time and money by making things better than they have to be. Sometimes you have to go with a less capable result because the alternative will take too long or cost too much to develop, or (since we're talking aerospace here) weigh too much. The trick, of course, is to know exactly how good is enough.
  - onceUponADime 7y ago
    There are some companys who manage it though, by basically getting bi-furicated intwo two seperat internal divisions competing against one another. Basically if you have a safe seat- or monopoly, you must learn to play catch against yourself or else.. boing, and important parts go flying.
    - pkaye 7y ago
      > There are some companys who manage it though, by basically getting bi-furicated intwo two seperat internal divisions competing against one another. Sometimes that competing becomes backstabbing between the divisions.
      - sct202 7y ago
        And then the company falls apart when you get a real competitor and the divisions are too busy attacking each other.
        thombat 7y ago
        And Nokia was one such company, in the latter days of S60 smartphones. One (of many) re-orgs produced three main phone divisions called something like: entertainment, executive, and enterprise, with high-level features partitioned between them [1]. So "entertainment" gets the high-quality auto-focus camera because that's great for blogging hipsters, and "executive" gets the barcode reading software so suits can scan the QR codes on business cards [2] ... except they couldn't because without a decent auto-focus camera the QR code needed to be printed on A3 paper and stuck on the wall to be scanable. Yes, this was discovered in internal testing. Yes, it shipped anyway. Down in the trenches we made bitter jokes about "three bald men fighting over a comb" as we watched our Lords and Masters engage with the looming competition by making snide public remarks about "that fruit company", having long before killed the touchscreen prototypes. But at least Boeing would have handled this situation differently: we'd have been fired for those jokes. [1] and what if you're an "executive" working in an "enterprise" who likes to kick back with some "entertainment" on the commute? KA-CHING! you're gonna buy three Nokia phones! Or zero, more likely. [2] that was seriously advanced as a leading use case. Quite probably by an in-house futurist.
kaonashi 7y ago
Good article on the subject: https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/the-coming-boeing-bailout https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/the-coming-boeing-bailout
toohotatopic 7y ago
>Boeing, one of the US’s largest and most important companies, acquired its longtime plane manufacturer rival, McDonnell Douglas, in what was then the country’s tenth-largest merger. >The resulting giant took Boeing’s name. More unexpectedly, it took its culture and strategy from McDonnell Douglas https://www.msn.com/en-za/money/news/how-the-mcdonnell-douglas-boeing-merger-led-to-the-737-max-crisis/ar-BBYzJXz https://www.msn.com/en-za/money/news/how-the-mcdonnell-dougl...
- AlexCoventry 7y ago
  Great article. It's an interesting framing, that Boeing's woes stem from a shift from "great engineering firm protected by airlines' government-mandated monopolies" to "lean engine of capitalism." The story about McDonnell-Douglas doing much better out of the merger than you would expect for the junior partner is interesting, too. It would be fascinating to read more about howthat happened.
afterburner 7y ago
Welcome to any large company that's been around for a while. Especially successful ones.
- vsareto 7y ago
  And especially ones who bid on US government contracts
xiphias2 7y ago
Isn't that the main reason why people from governments want to do business with them? If a company is not corrupt, it's not able to backchannel a big part of the money.
Phrenzy 7y ago
I was working as a contractor at Boeing for 2 years. None of this surprises me.

uxp100 7y ago

Yeah. As the company, you don't want emails like that coming out, but getting rid of messages like that damages the so called safety culture. I think a good answer as a CEO would be to tell managers to be more careful in emails, but no real punishment. However, the criticism in the emails was pretty low content, it's not like this was a message that said, man those monkeys really screwed up the MCAS or something. I think you might see messages like that even on well designed products, people get frustrated.

at-fates-hands 7y ago
>> Yeah. As the company, you don't want emails like that coming out Which, honestly shocked me they were sending emails like that in the first place. Talk among yourselves at the lunch table, complain in private and try to talk to someone in management who will listen. It was 2018 for god's sake. Do these engineers still not know how stupid it is to be sending emails like that around the company? Maybe it just highlights how out of touch the culture was there to begin with? It just seems reckless and these people should be smart enough to know better.
- HarryHirsch 7y ago
  But the emails ("designed by clowns", "wouldn't put my family on it") are just the symptom. Even if the whole engineering division had kept its mouth firmly shut the aircraft would still have been designed by clowns, and no one's family should be put on it. This is shared reality. The goal should be to prevent such commentary by picking up on well-founded engineering concerns before management commits to building a product that is not viable because it cannot perform.
- xoa 7y ago
  >Do these engineers still not know how stupid it is to be sending emails like that around the company? I've started to wonder over the past few years myself: maybe in some cases they very much do, and it's not stupid at all? If you know such emails may come out in case of trouble, then it can in turn become a tool for a low level of whistleblowing/accountability in a hard situation. A lot of us are fortunate enough to not be placed in professional/personal situations where we'd see something with life-safety consequences and not be able to blow the whistle or feel comfortable walking away. But what if one were, or what if the situation is genuinely gray? Like, you get the feeling something may be off the tracks in process, and your management chain/reporting processes aren't responsive, but it's not actually at all clear from your level that it's really important. Maybe it's just you. Sending a "private" email with your concerns to a coworker over official email might be then be a good way to bookmark that. If nothing ever happens it'll forever remain an undiscovered internal email. But if things ever go so wrong that the company actually faces subpoenas from the government over it than there will be a record. I mean, what you're saying seems to imply that the engineers should have been concerned about keeping Boeing's bad behavior private right? Well, should they? Yeah the company under its modern McDonnell Douglas leadership certainly doesn't want emails like that coming out following the deaths of hundreds of people due to a bunch of company blunders. But I don't think it follows that engineers shouldn't want emails like that coming out. If they're angry enough, they may even actively want such emails to reveal exactly how bad things had gotten internally, in ways that really would embarrass leadership in a newspaper headline or Congressional hearing.

cipher_system 7y ago

By being part of the leadership ranks and being unaware, shouldn't the disciplinary actions extend upon himself as well? Maybe being a total dick gives you a free pass at Boeing.

leroy_masochist 7y ago
The current CEO, Calhoun, took over a month ago after his predecessor, Muilenberg, was fired for the exact reason you just mentioned
- lutorm 7y ago
  He was always on the Board, though.

asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago

Seems like there are two possible takeaways. One is the one you called out. The other is to escalate issues your reports raise to you. "My pilots think this plane is trash. I better tell my boss." He could have taken either route and been safe at least from being canned. Boeing seems to be publicly expecting everyone to take the second approach.

bilbo0s 7y ago
>He could have taken either route and been safe at least from being canned. I don't know? Unless I'm misunderstanding the story, I'm not sure the guy they fired could have escalated issues he was not informed of? I suppose we could assume that he was informed of the issues, just not via any documented method? But based only on the information given in the article, I'm just not sure how someone not even in the loop on an issue, can reasonably be expected to escalate that issue? Maybe I'm misapprehending the article?
- asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
  No, you've got it right. I missed the negation on him receiving the messages. In that case, his firing is incomprehensible, at least if this is the sole cause.

mfoy_ 7y ago

An alternative take is that they just sacked one of the "monkeys". ;)

mc32 7y ago

Yeah that’s not a positive conclusion to come to in light of what their internal lack of negative feedback loops resulted in. They should instead promote a system that discovers the clowns-and-monkeys comments in order to address the concerns revealed by the comments rather than attempt to stamp out the only negative feedback loop they had. Instead they seem to have hired another “monkey” for CEO. Hope they hire a better person before even more damage to corporate culture happens.

LoSboccacc 7y ago

"the beatings will continue until morale improves"

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]