4 ms·

Do you see the problem with that argument that "the McDonnell merger was the root of all evil in the current Boeing"? - First there is no way to falsify that a

Do you see the problem with that argument that "the McDonnell merger was the root of all evil in the current Boeing"? - First there is no way to falsify that assertion. It is completely unfalsifiable and unscientific. - Second, there is no one from McDonnell here to defend them. This assertion is at best innuendo and at worst defamatory and tars McDonnell unfairly. - Let's say that the merger was the cause of all the evil. So what? Really, so what. The shareholders and employees of the combined entity have reaped the benefit of the merger for two decades. I don't care if they merged with McDonnell or McDonald or McSorely's. The current Boeing inflicted this disaster on us. Lets hold them accountable and dispense with the fantastical stories of some company they merged with 20 years ago which did them in.

salawat 6y ago
>"the McDonnell merger was the root of all evil in the current Boeing"...and more arguments on its irrelevance The problem with doing as you say is ypu're cutting out the factors that led to the problem. Companies do not fail in a day except in the most spectacular circumstances. Culture death is a death of many cuts, just as a successful corporate culture is the outcome of concerted, consistent effort. People in the presence of a good corporate culture don't generally make downright negligent, dangerous decisions. You need a dysfunctional culture to elevate those dangerous decisions to the "new, desirable status quo". Just look at investment banking or finance for examples of those by the boatload. Quality culture requires Quality upkeep. If you set the incentives wrong, everything quickly goes downhill from there. I see it everywhere I go. Maintaining a quality first mindset is not natural at all. It is Hard. It requires accountability, it requires everyone chipping in and doing at times their own job, plus someone elses enough to cover those bad days. It requires vigilance, egolessness, and a drive to stop the whole bloody show rather than deliver a sub-par, unworkable product. It requires as close as you'll ever get to unity and clarity of purpose from top to bottom. Throw out any of that, and effort invested to desirable output ratio just balloons from there. You had a Boeing competitor with a clear history of decision making that caused issues like MAX (DC-10, MD-11). You had an unprecedented period of aerospace consolidation. You saw a turning over of the guard in a shining star of the space where the very people who worked there and still had family there calling out that the culture had changed for the worse. >The relentless message: Shareholders would henceforth come first at Boeing. The important thing was not to get “overly focused on the box,” Hopkins said in a 2000 interview with Bloomberg. “The box”—the plane itself—“is obviously important, but customers are assuming the box is of great quality.” This was heresy to engineers, to whom the box was everything. The strike that year was formally over wages and benefits, but workers described it as a referendum on management.[1] The engineering powerhouse, famous for building "the box" stopped caring about the building "the box". They pivoted to growth and financial performance at all costs. >12a. Remove barriers that rob the hourly worker of his right to pride of workmanship. The responsibility of supervisors must be changed from sheer numbers to quality.[2] >12b. Remove barriers that rob people in management and in engineering of their right to pride of workmanship. This means, inter alia, abolishment of the annual or merit rating and of management by objective.[2] They did everything they could to union bust, damping the spirits and pride that workers brought to the job. >End the practice of awarding business on the basis of price tag. Instead, minimize total cost. Move toward a single supplier for any one item, on a long-term relationship of loyalty and trust.[2] They outsourced without regard for Quality of product or building loyalty and trust with suppliers. >Boeing began putting more junior employees into the roles, and some employees believed that was because they’d be more willing to listen to managers and less likely to dig in their heels, Dickson says. “How long do you want to keep polishing that apple?” was a phrase managers often used with engineers who wanted to keep testing, he says.[1] They skimped on training, and did everything possible to wring leniency out of their regulator. They penalized anyone who pointed out a Quality problem. These are not the hallmarks of a company that people point to as an example of quality culture, and the tipping point and timeframe from shift of incentives to long-term production of lackluster results is just about right. These are not unscientific observations. They are clear as day. You had means, management swapout/changing of incentives, culture degradation; opportunity (merger); and motive (hello stock options)! You don't do any of the aforementioned and come out smelling like roses, let alone all at the same time. The finance first school of corporate management, is not, in fact, the same culture that blazed the path for ever safer skies. Even once an Engineer (Mullenberg) got bumped up to CEO eventually, he inherited a dysfunctional organization, stripped of it's safeguards by the severity of the cultural transformation that had already taken place, and that he was a part and parcel of. To be honest, I feel bad for the guy. If anything went wrong, it was that he didn't disrupt the place enough on turn over to see where the mold had started to grow. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-05-09/former-boeing-engineers-say-relentless-cost-cutting-sacrificed-safety https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-05-09/former-bo... [2]https://deming.org/explore/fourteen-points/ https://deming.org/explore/fourteen-points/ It isn't about blaming ghosts. It's about acknowledging that as human beings, the institutions we establish are as much in a transient state of being, development, and growth as we ourselves are. The are the being, to which we were the cells and organelles. Therefore, you have to take into account the devil in the details to ensure the same degradation or slipping is recognized for what it is and remediated the moment it rears its ugly head. To do anything else; to blind oneself to the way change propagates through human systems, is to doom the lot of us to making the same mistakes again. You do you. However, as someone who dug into every detail of those investigations I could get my hands on at the time, down to running the math, looking up regulations, designs, blueprints, etc.? I saw enough of the warning signs to recognize the processes at work. Culture went down the tubes. It doesn't exonerate anyone involved necessarily, and yeah, more people should have spoke out. Maybe they'd have risked it if there was more competition in the sector? Maybe not. But we at least know a pattern to look for.
- xwolfi 6y ago
  I had to reply to you on investment banks. "Look at IBs for examples by the boatloads". I hope you dont imply banks in general have a culture problem, more than aviation or bakeries ? Cutting corners is a result of a cultural dysfunction that happens everywhere. The reason why you feel you care about IB is because salaries are high and it was easier to blame them for 2008 than blame the culprits (easy loan policies, millions of voting adults jump on speculative loops in real estate, specialized lenders lying on loan application, US gov exporting securitized debt to Germany, etc... IBs just were a middle man taken by surprise in an ocean of shit everyone was swimming in happily)
  - fakedang 6y ago
    IBs were just a middle man taken by surprise in an ocean of shit? Boy oh boy, IBs were pumping that shit into the ocean, knowing fully well it was shit. They just didn't know that their drinking pipes were drawn from the same ocean.
tw04 6y ago
> First there is no way to falsify that assertion. It is completely unfalsifiable and unscientific. Sure there is. If all the management at Boeing stayed in charge, there would be no MD executives and management to have tarnished Boeing's culture. But that's not what happened. MD DID take over management and DID change the culture. >Second, there is no one from McDonnell here to defend them. This assertion is at best innuendo and at worst defamatory and tars McDonnell unfairly. Really? It was pretty widely known throughout the industry what MD's culture and management was like. There's nobody to "defend them" because they considered the behavior perfectly acceptable. >Let's say that the merger was the cause of all the evil. So what? Really, so what. The shareholders and employees of the combined entity have reaped the benefit of the merger for two decades. So... I would hope we as a species realize there are limits to profit at all cost and learn from it?? As for proof, all you need to do look back to the mid-90s. I remember what a mess MD was, it's not hard to research. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1995/12/17/celebrating-a-turnaround/2fce3183-919d-4bcc-95af-8353487365a5/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1995/12/17/c... Highlights include: >All aerospace firms are cutting costs to match declining orders, but McDonnell Douglas does it with an unmatched aggression. It has shed 52 percent of its work force over the past seven years, dropping to 63,000 employees. >Stonecipher defines one of his key roles as "making sure we employ not one person more than we absolutely need." He insists that company managers cut costs yearly, with "zero allowance for inflation." Cutting costs to absolute 0 doesn't allow for a culture of quality and craftsmanship, period. Taking time and doing things right has excess spend by definition.
- wahern 6y ago
  > Sure there is. If all the management at Boeing stayed in charge, there would be no MD executives and management to have tarnished Boeing's culture. But that's not what happened. MD DID take over management and DID change the culture. The problem with this narrative is that Boeing CEO/President/Chairman Philip Condit knew precisely what he was doing when he sought the merger. The board had elevated him precisely to make a strategic move like that--in fact, to make that particular move. And most importantly the board knowingly chose the financial pitches of the McDonnell Douglas executives over the protests of the more risk-averse Boeing CFO Givans and his faction. Givans was pushed out shortly after the merger by Condit and the board, including original Boeing board members. (See https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=19980715&slug=2761320 https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=19980715&slug... Unfortunately I can't find some of the more informative contemporaneous accounts that explain it better.) All of which is to say, Boeing's engineering-first culture was already on the way out before the merger. Yes, McDonnell Douglas executives ended up winning the power struggles, but that was Condit's and the board's plan from the get go. McDonnell Douglas was the vehicle, not the instigator. But top Boeing leadership didn't want too much spectacle because they needed to keep stringing along a handful of board members and major investors who were wary of the strategic and cultural shifts.
wahern 6y ago
The former McDonnell Douglas and Boeing CEO couldn't have been any more clear when he stated, "When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it's run like a business rather than a great engineering firm." https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/how-boeing-lost-its-bearings/602188/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/how-boeing... I don't think there's any serious dispute (now or then) that McDonnell Douglas was a financial engineering company first and foremost, not an engineering company. Likewise, leading into the merger Boeing's reputation as an engineering-first company was widely accepted. But as I mention elsethread, claims that McDonnell Douglas corrupted Boeing are problematic. Top Boeing leadership had already made their choice to transform the culture before the merger; the merger was the execution.
- haltingproblem 6y ago
  Valid point. Root cause attribution is still problematic. My problem with the narrative is two fold: [1] Assigning the "cause" of the 737Max fiasco to culture instead of plain hubris, complacency, etc. [2] Even if [1] is true, attributing the culture shift to the McDoug merger. There is simply no way to test/falsify it. It becomes purely a narrative. Even if McDoug was a financial engineering company first and foremost where is the counterfactual that Boeing would not have arrived here anyways? Are there other great engineering organizations that have arrived in a dysfunctional place without an infusion of alien culture. Look at NASA, what was the financial engineering culture that enforced a launch at any cost mindset? McDoug culture as the culprit in the 737Max disaster is a fanciful narrative, an adult version of the tooth fairy and santa claus. Fanciful narratives are fine but here they are being used to exonerate Boeing by blame shifting.

salawat 6y ago

>"the McDonnell merger was the root of all evil in the current Boeing"...and more arguments on its irrelevance The problem with doing as you say is ypu're cutting out the factors that led to the problem. Companies do not fail in a day except in the most spectacular circumstances. Culture death is a death of many cuts, just as a successful corporate culture is the outcome of concerted, consistent effort. People in the presence of a good corporate culture don't generally make downright negligent, dangerous decisions. You need a dysfunctional culture to elevate those dangerous decisions to the "new, desirable status quo". Just look at investment banking or finance for examples of those by the boatload. Quality culture requires Quality upkeep. If you set the incentives wrong, everything quickly goes downhill from there. I see it everywhere I go. Maintaining a quality first mindset is not natural at all. It is Hard. It requires accountability, it requires everyone chipping in and doing at times their own job, plus someone elses enough to cover those bad days. It requires vigilance, egolessness, and a drive to stop the whole bloody show rather than deliver a sub-par, unworkable product. It requires as close as you'll ever get to unity and clarity of purpose from top to bottom. Throw out any of that, and effort invested to desirable output ratio just balloons from there. You had a Boeing competitor with a clear history of decision making that caused issues like MAX (DC-10, MD-11). You had an unprecedented period of aerospace consolidation. You saw a turning over of the guard in a shining star of the space where the very people who worked there and still had family there calling out that the culture had changed for the worse. >The relentless message: Shareholders would henceforth come first at Boeing. The important thing was not to get “overly focused on the box,” Hopkins said in a 2000 interview with Bloomberg. “The box”—the plane itself—“is obviously important, but customers are assuming the box is of great quality.” This was heresy to engineers, to whom the box was everything. The strike that year was formally over wages and benefits, but workers described it as a referendum on management.[1] The engineering powerhouse, famous for building "the box" stopped caring about the building "the box". They pivoted to growth and financial performance at all costs. >12a. Remove barriers that rob the hourly worker of his right to pride of workmanship. The responsibility of supervisors must be changed from sheer numbers to quality.[2] >12b. Remove barriers that rob people in management and in engineering of their right to pride of workmanship. This means, inter alia, abolishment of the annual or merit rating and of management by objective.[2] They did everything they could to union bust, damping the spirits and pride that workers brought to the job. >End the practice of awarding business on the basis of price tag. Instead, minimize total cost. Move toward a single supplier for any one item, on a long-term relationship of loyalty and trust.[2] They outsourced without regard for Quality of product or building loyalty and trust with suppliers. >Boeing began putting more junior employees into the roles, and some employees believed that was because they’d be more willing to listen to managers and less likely to dig in their heels, Dickson says. “How long do you want to keep polishing that apple?” was a phrase managers often used with engineers who wanted to keep testing, he says.[1] They skimped on training, and did everything possible to wring leniency out of their regulator. They penalized anyone who pointed out a Quality problem. These are not the hallmarks of a company that people point to as an example of quality culture, and the tipping point and timeframe from shift of incentives to long-term production of lackluster results is just about right. These are not unscientific observations. They are clear as day. You had means, management swapout/changing of incentives, culture degradation; opportunity (merger); and motive (hello stock options)! You don't do any of the aforementioned and come out smelling like roses, let alone all at the same time. The finance first school of corporate management, is not, in fact, the same culture that blazed the path for ever safer skies. Even once an Engineer (Mullenberg) got bumped up to CEO eventually, he inherited a dysfunctional organization, stripped of it's safeguards by the severity of the cultural transformation that had already taken place, and that he was a part and parcel of. To be honest, I feel bad for the guy. If anything went wrong, it was that he didn't disrupt the place enough on turn over to see where the mold had started to grow. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-05-09/former-boeing-engineers-say-relentless-cost-cutting-sacrificed-safety https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-05-09/former-bo... [2]https://deming.org/explore/fourteen-points/ https://deming.org/explore/fourteen-points/ It isn't about blaming ghosts. It's about acknowledging that as human beings, the institutions we establish are as much in a transient state of being, development, and growth as we ourselves are. The are the being, to which we were the cells and organelles. Therefore, you have to take into account the devil in the details to ensure the same degradation or slipping is recognized for what it is and remediated the moment it rears its ugly head. To do anything else; to blind oneself to the way change propagates through human systems, is to doom the lot of us to making the same mistakes again. You do you. However, as someone who dug into every detail of those investigations I could get my hands on at the time, down to running the math, looking up regulations, designs, blueprints, etc.? I saw enough of the warning signs to recognize the processes at work. Culture went down the tubes. It doesn't exonerate anyone involved necessarily, and yeah, more people should have spoke out. Maybe they'd have risked it if there was more competition in the sector? Maybe not. But we at least know a pattern to look for.

xwolfi 6y ago
I had to reply to you on investment banks. "Look at IBs for examples by the boatloads". I hope you dont imply banks in general have a culture problem, more than aviation or bakeries ? Cutting corners is a result of a cultural dysfunction that happens everywhere. The reason why you feel you care about IB is because salaries are high and it was easier to blame them for 2008 than blame the culprits (easy loan policies, millions of voting adults jump on speculative loops in real estate, specialized lenders lying on loan application, US gov exporting securitized debt to Germany, etc... IBs just were a middle man taken by surprise in an ocean of shit everyone was swimming in happily)
- fakedang 6y ago
  IBs were just a middle man taken by surprise in an ocean of shit? Boy oh boy, IBs were pumping that shit into the ocean, knowing fully well it was shit. They just didn't know that their drinking pipes were drawn from the same ocean.

tw04 6y ago

> First there is no way to falsify that assertion. It is completely unfalsifiable and unscientific. Sure there is. If all the management at Boeing stayed in charge, there would be no MD executives and management to have tarnished Boeing's culture. But that's not what happened. MD DID take over management and DID change the culture. >Second, there is no one from McDonnell here to defend them. This assertion is at best innuendo and at worst defamatory and tars McDonnell unfairly. Really? It was pretty widely known throughout the industry what MD's culture and management was like. There's nobody to "defend them" because they considered the behavior perfectly acceptable. >Let's say that the merger was the cause of all the evil. So what? Really, so what. The shareholders and employees of the combined entity have reaped the benefit of the merger for two decades. So... I would hope we as a species realize there are limits to profit at all cost and learn from it?? As for proof, all you need to do look back to the mid-90s. I remember what a mess MD was, it's not hard to research. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1995/12/17/celebrating-a-turnaround/2fce3183-919d-4bcc-95af-8353487365a5/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1995/12/17/c... Highlights include: >All aerospace firms are cutting costs to match declining orders, but McDonnell Douglas does it with an unmatched aggression. It has shed 52 percent of its work force over the past seven years, dropping to 63,000 employees. >Stonecipher defines one of his key roles as "making sure we employ not one person more than we absolutely need." He insists that company managers cut costs yearly, with "zero allowance for inflation." Cutting costs to absolute 0 doesn't allow for a culture of quality and craftsmanship, period. Taking time and doing things right has excess spend by definition.

wahern 6y ago
> Sure there is. If all the management at Boeing stayed in charge, there would be no MD executives and management to have tarnished Boeing's culture. But that's not what happened. MD DID take over management and DID change the culture. The problem with this narrative is that Boeing CEO/President/Chairman Philip Condit knew precisely what he was doing when he sought the merger. The board had elevated him precisely to make a strategic move like that--in fact, to make that particular move. And most importantly the board knowingly chose the financial pitches of the McDonnell Douglas executives over the protests of the more risk-averse Boeing CFO Givans and his faction. Givans was pushed out shortly after the merger by Condit and the board, including original Boeing board members. (See https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=19980715&slug=2761320 https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=19980715&slug... Unfortunately I can't find some of the more informative contemporaneous accounts that explain it better.) All of which is to say, Boeing's engineering-first culture was already on the way out before the merger. Yes, McDonnell Douglas executives ended up winning the power struggles, but that was Condit's and the board's plan from the get go. McDonnell Douglas was the vehicle, not the instigator. But top Boeing leadership didn't want too much spectacle because they needed to keep stringing along a handful of board members and major investors who were wary of the strategic and cultural shifts.

wahern 6y ago

The former McDonnell Douglas and Boeing CEO couldn't have been any more clear when he stated, "When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it's run like a business rather than a great engineering firm." https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/how-boeing-lost-its-bearings/602188/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/how-boeing... I don't think there's any serious dispute (now or then) that McDonnell Douglas was a financial engineering company first and foremost, not an engineering company. Likewise, leading into the merger Boeing's reputation as an engineering-first company was widely accepted. But as I mention elsethread, claims that McDonnell Douglas corrupted Boeing are problematic. Top Boeing leadership had already made their choice to transform the culture before the merger; the merger was the execution.

haltingproblem 6y ago
Valid point. Root cause attribution is still problematic. My problem with the narrative is two fold: [1] Assigning the "cause" of the 737Max fiasco to culture instead of plain hubris, complacency, etc. [2] Even if [1] is true, attributing the culture shift to the McDoug merger. There is simply no way to test/falsify it. It becomes purely a narrative. Even if McDoug was a financial engineering company first and foremost where is the counterfactual that Boeing would not have arrived here anyways? Are there other great engineering organizations that have arrived in a dysfunctional place without an infusion of alien culture. Look at NASA, what was the financial engineering culture that enforced a launch at any cost mindset? McDoug culture as the culprit in the 737Max disaster is a fanciful narrative, an adult version of the tooth fairy and santa claus. Fanciful narratives are fine but here they are being used to exonerate Boeing by blame shifting.