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It's usually not possible to fix a company that is broken, simply because of Gall's Law. ("A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from

It's usually not possible to fix a company that is broken, simply because of Gall's Law. ("A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.") Large companies are complex systems; they develop their own set of internal incentives, communications architectures, org politics, membership tests, etc. Over time, these incentives inevitably adapt themselves toward maintaining the organization rather than delivering the product or service that is the reason why the organization exists. At that point, everyone who actually wants to deliver the product leaves, leaving an organization consisting solely of people whose full-time job is maintaining their position in the organization. Ask yourself: would you take a position at Boeing trying to "fix the company"? The only way out of this is to poach the few remaining employees that still have technical knowledge, setup a new company that refuses to employ everyone with a vested interest in Boeing, and take their market. This is hard for aerospace because of the sheer complexity of the product and the baseline quality levels needed to deliver a safe experience.

DiggyJohnson 3y ago
I did, and it was one of the worst periods of my career. And I went in knowing it was going to be challenging, I wasn’t naive, it was just worse than I expected.
zmgsabst 3y ago
> Ask yourself: would you take a position at Boeing trying to "fix the company"? As an executive with guaranteed $xM in pay over a few years? Sure — if I fail, I’ll just use that position as a stepping stone to my next executive role. Why wouldn’t I take a shot at something positive, when there’s little to no downside?
- nostrademons 3y ago
  Are you actually fixing the company then, or just extracting value while maintaining the organization? This is why we have the world that we do.
  - zmgsabst 3y ago
    I would genuinely try to fix it, based on descriptions by my mentors who were Boeing engineers. I believe the board and executives would genuinely want me to fix it. But it may nevertheless be impossible due to organizational mechanics, entrenched bureaucracy, short-sighted shareholders, etc. I was just pointing out that it’s ridiculous to pretend nobody would want the job because it’s likely to fail when there’s only upside, for both yourself and the company. A literal win-win. Implying there’s something negative in my comment because it’s easy to be cheaply cynical (and the cheap cynicism in the comment I originally replied to) is what’s actually wrong with the world — and why things are so bad. Who gives up on something that only has upsides without even trying?
    - nostrademons 3y ago
      Your line "Sure — if I fail, I’ll just use that position as a stepping stone to my next executive role" indicated a certain cynicism in your own post, so I was reflecting that in my response. So here's the more detailed sincere response, based on experience working in a similar large, similarly dysfunctional technology company (and also knowing people who spent several years at Boeing specifically): It is usually not possible for a chief executive to fix a company. The reason is simply sheer complexity. A company of 100,000 people has potentially 100,000! (factorial) different working relationships within it. In practice it's less because not everyone communicates with everybody else, but even a small department of 100 people has more different relationships than anyone can possibly keep track of. No one executive is going to know every single employee, every team, every project. And without them having those personal relationships, they don't have enough trust to convince people to alter their behavior. If the company is in trouble in the first place, that means that the way they do business is no longer adapted to the marketplace. So you need to get the company to make changes. But if you root cause each individual problem, you find that the company is fractally fucked up. The employee is usually acting according to the incentives available to them; if they did things differently, they would fail to get the cooperation needed to accomplish their goals (at best) or lose their job (at worse). And that's the key part: in a big company, achieving any goal, regardless of how small, requires the cooperation of many different people. In a normal functioning company things mostly work because these habits of cooperation grew up in good times, working culture & processes adapted themselves to the activities that actually made the company money, and so when people just do their jobs good things basically result. But as the company grows and ages, it ossifies. Over time they want to do things like introduce a new jetliner, but find that the right combination of people with the right skillsets to do things like make engine nacelles that don't explode no longer exist. This is why advice for turnaround CEOs is "get the wrong people off the bus and the right people on the bus". And they frequently hire outsiders, or folks from much earlier in the company's history. Their first task is to stabilize finances. Their next task is to identify the parts of the company that are still functional, then double down on them (often made harder because these folks were often laid off as part of stabilizing finances). Their next task is to sell off or lay off all the folks that are embedded in organizations that are no longer serving the company's purposes. Remember that there are > 100K employees, and you're building a product of exceptional engineering complexity, and that nobody knows everything the company is doing. It's pretty hard to have enough visibility into the company's product, engineering, supplier relationships, employee base, finances, etc. to do this correctly.

DiggyJohnson 3y ago

I did, and it was one of the worst periods of my career. And I went in knowing it was going to be challenging, I wasn’t naive, it was just worse than I expected.

zmgsabst 3y ago

> Ask yourself: would you take a position at Boeing trying to "fix the company"? As an executive with guaranteed $xM in pay over a few years? Sure — if I fail, I’ll just use that position as a stepping stone to my next executive role. Why wouldn’t I take a shot at something positive, when there’s little to no downside?

nostrademons 3y ago
Are you actually fixing the company then, or just extracting value while maintaining the organization? This is why we have the world that we do.
- zmgsabst 3y ago
  I would genuinely try to fix it, based on descriptions by my mentors who were Boeing engineers. I believe the board and executives would genuinely want me to fix it. But it may nevertheless be impossible due to organizational mechanics, entrenched bureaucracy, short-sighted shareholders, etc. I was just pointing out that it’s ridiculous to pretend nobody would want the job because it’s likely to fail when there’s only upside, for both yourself and the company. A literal win-win. Implying there’s something negative in my comment because it’s easy to be cheaply cynical (and the cheap cynicism in the comment I originally replied to) is what’s actually wrong with the world — and why things are so bad. Who gives up on something that only has upsides without even trying?
  - nostrademons 3y ago
    Your line "Sure — if I fail, I’ll just use that position as a stepping stone to my next executive role" indicated a certain cynicism in your own post, so I was reflecting that in my response. So here's the more detailed sincere response, based on experience working in a similar large, similarly dysfunctional technology company (and also knowing people who spent several years at Boeing specifically): It is usually not possible for a chief executive to fix a company. The reason is simply sheer complexity. A company of 100,000 people has potentially 100,000! (factorial) different working relationships within it. In practice it's less because not everyone communicates with everybody else, but even a small department of 100 people has more different relationships than anyone can possibly keep track of. No one executive is going to know every single employee, every team, every project. And without them having those personal relationships, they don't have enough trust to convince people to alter their behavior. If the company is in trouble in the first place, that means that the way they do business is no longer adapted to the marketplace. So you need to get the company to make changes. But if you root cause each individual problem, you find that the company is fractally fucked up. The employee is usually acting according to the incentives available to them; if they did things differently, they would fail to get the cooperation needed to accomplish their goals (at best) or lose their job (at worse). And that's the key part: in a big company, achieving any goal, regardless of how small, requires the cooperation of many different people. In a normal functioning company things mostly work because these habits of cooperation grew up in good times, working culture & processes adapted themselves to the activities that actually made the company money, and so when people just do their jobs good things basically result. But as the company grows and ages, it ossifies. Over time they want to do things like introduce a new jetliner, but find that the right combination of people with the right skillsets to do things like make engine nacelles that don't explode no longer exist. This is why advice for turnaround CEOs is "get the wrong people off the bus and the right people on the bus". And they frequently hire outsiders, or folks from much earlier in the company's history. Their first task is to stabilize finances. Their next task is to identify the parts of the company that are still functional, then double down on them (often made harder because these folks were often laid off as part of stabilizing finances). Their next task is to sell off or lay off all the folks that are embedded in organizations that are no longer serving the company's purposes. Remember that there are > 100K employees, and you're building a product of exceptional engineering complexity, and that nobody knows everything the company is doing. It's pretty hard to have enough visibility into the company's product, engineering, supplier relationships, employee base, finances, etc. to do this correctly.