8 ms·
Good book describing the cultural change from engineering-focus to business-focus of Boeing: * https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55994102-flying-blind https:
by throw0101d 3y ago
Good book describing the cultural change from engineering-focus to business-focus of Boeing:
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55994102-flying-blind https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55994102-flying-blind
* https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/646497/flying-blind-by-peter-robison/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/646497/flying-blind...
- wkat4242 3y agoI watched a documentary on Netflix recently that alleged that a lot of this change came from importing McDonnell Douglas management into Boeing after the acquisition. I wonder if the book concurs on that, I don't have time to read it right now. If this is the case I wonder if it could be reversible.
- throw0101d 3y agoYes: the running joke is/was that McD bought Boeing with Boeing's money. * https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/how-boeing-lost-its-bearings/602188/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/how-boeing... * https://archive.is/q5pQV https://archive.is/q5pQV * https://qz.com/1776080/how-the-mcdonnell-douglas-boeing-merger-led-to-the-737-max-crisis https://qz.com/1776080/how-the-mcdonnell-douglas-boeing-merg... * https://simpleflying.com/mcdonnel-douglas-boeing-merger/ https://simpleflying.com/mcdonnel-douglas-boeing-merger/ B was pressured to buy McD for 'national security' reasons. What would have been a better idea would have been, instead of doing an 'total' acquisition, is to wait for McD to go bankrupt, and then buy the parts that didn't suck. When they did the acquisition, they also got the management folks… who ran McD into the ground in the first place.
- jes5199 3y agoI’ve heard variations on this story a few times, successful company swallows failing company and gets infected by failing-culture. Isn’t that what happened to Netscape?
- bsimpson 3y agoWho poisoned Netscape?
- wvenable 3y agoAOL
- bsimpson 3y agoDidn't AOL buy Netscape? There's a long list of companies that died by being acquired into a bad culture. OP is talking about the opposite: an acquisition so toxic it rots the parent company.
- kevin_thibedeau 3y agoAOL was borgified by Time Warner management post acquisition the same way Boeing was by MD.
- squiffsquiff 3y agoYou make it sound like AOL was cool before the Time-Warner merger and people didn't joke about e.g. the free trial CD's
- kevin_thibedeau 3y agoThey were a successful online service before the internet. Yes. They were just as cool as Compuserve and Prodigy.
- lmm 3y agoBy the time of the merger with Time Warner they were a joke among technical people. They were in the same category as Compuserve and Prodigy, but marketed specifically as an "easy" service for less technical users.
- KptMarchewa 3y agoYou don't have to keep the management from the company you've bought.
- rtkwe 3y agoIn a broad sense high level management tends to take care of it's own in a bit of self interest so when they screw up and run a company into the ground chasing short term quarterly profits they'll also get taken care of.
- cinntaile 3y agoWell clearly the McD people were more skilled politicians.
- pstuart 3y agoThis can't be emphasized enough. Businesses (and most organizations) are not meritocracies.
- jaybrendansmith 3y agoThis is exactly it. The skilled politicians are the reason why the company failed in the first place. They then take over the acquiring company from within like a virus and destroy that next. Rule of thumb: If a company is failing and you purchase it, fire everybody. Either the culture or the people are poison, and they will infect you.
- jcadam 3y ago> fire everybody At the very least, anyone in a management position.
- jaybrendansmith 3y agoYes absolutely - keep the skilled folks below the VP level and perhaps some of the Directors. Generally garbage flows from the top down, and they've been putting up with it this entire time.
- akira2501 3y ago> B was pressured to buy McD for 'national security' reasons. Creating monopolies and reducing suppliers actually harms "national security." Our braindead managerial class in action.
- AdrianB1 3y agoThat is correct. However MDD was manufacturing key military products (F-15, F-18) and it was doing bad financially, going bankrupt and jeopardizing the fighter plane production and maintenance was a "national security" problem that forced the Boeing acquisition of MDD.
- akira2501 3y agoWeird how you can be a "key manufacturer" yet "go bankrupt." Perhaps they should have just been auctioned off and other investors given an opportunity to create new lines of business out of the incompetent mess they had become. Taking the mess and wholesale buying it into another company and then keeping the management that created the problem in the first place is astronomically dumb.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> Weird how you can be a "key manufacturer" yet "go bankrupt." We massively drew down defence spending at the end of the Cold War.
- jethro_tell 3y agoAlso, all the money in the world doesn't mean you spend it on things that make money later. If you spend your manufacturing budget on strippers, you won't have anything to sell later.
- tcmart14 3y agowoah woah now, someone has to put those young ladies through college and the manufacturing budget has to be spent.
- whycome 3y ago> B was pressured to buy McD for 'national security' reasons. Are we seeing similar things right now? Will companies like OpenAI or Nvidia be forced to merge or buy other players in the space? Nvidia already has to work around export restrictions. https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/17/23921131/us-china-restrictions-ai-chip-sales-nvidia https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/17/23921131/us-china-restri...
- shihab 3y agoAfter seeng your comment, I just went ahead and watched the doc, and I frankly I find myself in a state of rage right now. From my limited understanding, I had this impression this was an engineering failure. And you know, when you have a complicated machine, sometimes shit happens. But it wasn't that at all. Boeing knew clearly what the dangers of MCAS system were, they went to great lengths to completely hide the presence of the system from the world before delivery of the planes. Within days of the first crash, they knew it was MCAS, and kept trying to blame uneducated "foreign" pilots, kept trying to go on and tell the world again and again it was safe to fly, until that second crash happened. I understand greed, we all have that, but I don't understand how a company-wide culture can get so toxic, how utterly devoid of humanity do you have to be that your first concern after that crash and knowing there might be more deaths coming, is keeping wall street happy. And what the hell FAA? 1) they didn't regulate properly before the plane was delivered, 2) After first crash they knew how dangerous the plane is, but didn't ground it (TAMARA report), 3) After second crash, you had the transportation secratary basically saying 737 Max was "innocent untill proven guilty" so let it fly before China forced its hand, 4) No criminal proescution in the end for those fanatic executives, just a cash fine. And today this happens.
- smcin 3y agoYou have to view all US regulatory goings-on wrt Boeing through the lens of Airbus-Boeing/EU-US trade rivalry (plus China's COMAC as a new entrant). Boeing is the US's largest exporter (defense + civilian), and also the 65th largest US stock overall. Any US regulator action against Boeing would affect all that, plus US stock markets. You have to wonder how independent the FAA head can afford to be from Congressional interference, in the current setup. In the US, the FAA head is appointed (or, in recent admins, left vacant) by the Senate. Back in the 2018/9 first 737MAX scandal [0], it was the Canadian, EU and Chinese regulators which were more aggressive about investigating and grounding, meanwhile the US FAA dragged its feet on taking action against Boeing while its donees like Congressman Sam Graves (R-MO 6) [1] continued to blame foreign pilot training, which was dishonest and adding insult to injury. PS consider also in 2020, Rep. Mike Garcia (R-CA 27) secretly sold $50K Boeing stock ahead of his committee's damning 737MAX report; then avoided election scrutiny by simply blowing the deadline to report the stock sale... When he finally did disclose the sale, it was two weeks after the 2020 general election votes were cast, and three days after Garcia declared victory. He won by 333 votes. [2] There's some scrutiny of Congressmen insider-trading biotech/pharma stocks esp. which their own committees (gasp) regulate, but really not a lot of scrutiny on aerospace. [3] Compare to George Santos, who wasn't implicated in a coverup that actually killed hundreds of people. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_MAX_groundings#2019 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_MAX_groundings#2019 [1]: https://www.opensecrets.org/members-of-congress/sam-graves/summary?cid=N00013323 https://www.opensecrets.org/members-of-congress/sam-graves/s... [2]: https://www.thedailybeast.com/gop-rep-mike-garcia-secretly-sold-boeing-stock-ahead-of-damning-report https://www.thedailybeast.com/gop-rep-mike-garcia-secretly-s... [3]: NYT 2022/09 : These 97 Members of Congress Reported Trades in Companies Influenced by Their Committees https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/09/13/us/politics/congress-members-stock-trading-list.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/09/13/us/politics/c...
- JumpCrisscross 3y agoHas there been any push to break up Boeing?
- eunos 3y agoThe moment Boeing breakup discourse entering public discourse all of their lobbyists retinue will shout "Airbus, COMAC, Great Power Competition"
- brewdad 3y agoBoeings breaking up is how we got here.
- sumanthvepa 3y agoI know we're not supposed to be funny on this website. But that just broke me up.
- ethbr1 3y agoThe problem with breaking up Boeing is Airbus. Nowadays, to realistically restore competiveness in an industry, you'd have to coordinate a worldwide breakup of similarly-integrated competitors.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- wredue 3y agoConsidering the consistent gross mismanagement of Boeing, who receive free bailouts just for being Boeing Well, I was going to say that calling them “business oriented” is laughable, but I guess that running a business in to the ground then laughing all the way to the bail out bank is just standard operating procedure now around the world.
- g9yuayon 3y agoA friend of mine works in Boeing as a data scientist. His team has 10 people. Two of them can write code for analytics and models. The other 8 "manage projects", whatever that means. They spend their days creating processes, managing tickets, enforcing specific formats of tickets and stories and what not. Yet, none of the eight knew how to write product specs nor could be bothered with basic things like understanding how git works. I have a hard time imagining how Boeing could survive in the long run with this level of bureaucracy. Edit: Saw the summary of the book Flying Blind: "A fast-paced look at the corporate dysfunction--the ruthless cost-cutting, toxic workplaces, and cutthroat management--that contributed to one of the worst tragedies in modern aviation". One has to ask: where did the cost cutting go? What's cutting throat? It looks to me that the management of Boeing is grossly incompetent.
- ImaCake 3y agoI find this genuinely incomprehensible. I have never encountered a single person who was not technically proficient in the team’s tasks across the 10 years of my hodgepodge career in a variety of semi-independent small teams and currently a small business. Small teams don’t have the margin for non technical folk. It often falls on people like me to become, temporarily, the admin or become the GIS department as such things are needed.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- varispeed 3y agoBeen there. It's half bad if the "managers" can swallow their ego and let developers lead while only just keeping an eye on any potential troubles. At many big corporations these "management" hires are just political. To fill in the certain quotas and tick the boxes. Problems starts if they put their egos first. Then talented staff quit and projects go down the pan.
- H8crilA 3y agoAnd BTW, we have a market mechanism for this: bankruptcy. Preferably restructuring, not liquidating, though both are useful. Just leave the job and maybe one day the whole thing gets rewired.
- sundvor 3y agoThanks, had credits that needed burning so picked up an Audible version of that.
- dm319 3y agoThe Netflix series Downfall is very good and focuses a lot on the root causes of these technical issues (i.e. business-focus of the company).