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> Constant pressure to hit quarterly performance targets meant that machine quality often suffered. In some cases, machines would be shipped out the door unfi

> Constant pressure to hit quarterly performance targets meant that machine quality often suffered. In some cases, machines would be shipped out the door unfinished so the delivery could be booked, and assembly would be completed by service technicians at the customer’s location. In his history of the American machine tool industry, Albert Albrecht states that “the actions of these larger corporations and conglomerates, under the leadership of financial MBA’s, perhaps more than any other factor, contributed to the restructuring and decline of the US machine tool industry at the end of the 20th century.” In short, the MBAs happened. Clueless management was brought in who then decimated anything they did not understand. I.e. everything. Aided by Reagan policy to aggressively outsource manufacturing from the nineteen eighties US manufacturing just imploded. Just speculating here, but by the time the Japanese and the Germans caught up and got really good at machine tools, the metric system would have become an obstacle as well. Because the US insisting to do everything in inches, foot pounds, and what not doesn't translate very well internationally when you start outsourcing all your manufacturing. Outsourcing meant manufacturing standardized on the metric system using equipment and parts not made in the US. Just speculating here, but I imagine that all that combined lead to a natural preference for non US based manufacturing companies that took over from US companies to not use any US made equipment or parts. So, manufacturing became predominantly metric based and that would have affected standard components, screws, bolts, parts, etc. All made by non US companies standardizing on all of that.

cpursley 3y ago
MBA thinking ruins everything it touches. Boeing is another example. It's all about short-term profits over long term sustainability.
- lasermike026 3y ago
  Fire all the MBAs.
- mobilio 3y ago
  also HP...
baron816 3y ago
> Constant pressure to hit quarterly performance targets meant that machine quality often suffered. It’s not necessarily the case that greedy, ignorant MBAs came in and ruined everything. Like, if their practices were so inferior, then any domestic firm that didn’t get taken over by them should’ve had a leg up and could’ve dominated the domestic market. Don’t you think the more likely source of “pressure” was the international suppliers who had lower costs? > Aided by Reagan policy to aggressively outsource manufacturing from the nineteen eighties US manufacturing just imploded. Was the policy to outsource everything, or liberalize markets and let firms and consumers more freely choose where to buy things from? Globalization has done quite a lot to lift people out of poverty and keep prices low.
- lesuorac 3y ago
  > Like, if their practices were so inferior, then any domestic firm that didn’t get taken over by them should’ve had a leg up and could’ve dominated the domestic market. There aren't infinite firms. Plus in the article, the previous paragraph goes into how the tooling industry was being bought up by conglomerates so the finite firms became even easier to count. A company fitting your argument is Telsa. The existing firms weren't willing to canabalize their existing product lines so they didn't invest into EVs and now a domestic firm is eating at their market share. However, "Who killed the electric car?" is from 2006, there has been a lot of pent up demand for EVs that no domestic firm was selling to. However, something also fitting your argument is Moneyball [1][2]. It's not until the 2002 season that teams start to use statistics to determine who to staff their roasters? The League is from 1876; it took 126 years of baseball before a team figured out how to use math! > Don’t you think the more likely source of “pressure” was the international suppliers who had lower costs? Well, the article agrees in that it says "By now, tools from Japan and other countries were as good as or better than US tools, not to mention cheaper and more reliable.". However, R&D was also being cut prior to this so if you don't do any R&D and your products become uncompetitive it's probably because R&D was cut. > Was the policy to outsource everything, or liberalize markets and let firms and consumers more freely choose where to buy things from? Well, don't forget there are winners and losers when trading. In this case the losers are the American Tooling Industry; the winners were everybody that bought from them lol. -- I do think this growth every quarter is a big problem though. The early observers of business cycle all noticed that it has its ups and downs. Pretending that there won't be a down and fudging the numbers so that you don't have any downs is going to cause future problems. Delivering not-finished lathes counts to me as fudging the numbers. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moneyball_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moneyball_(film) [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabermetrics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabermetrics
hasty_pudding 3y ago
> In short, the MBAs happened This describes many many things in the USA.
- depereo 3y ago
  MBAs are fine, honestly. I have a manager who came up in the industry he works in. He worked at the 'coal-face', understands the issues and has real perspective. He got an MBA later in his career and uses what he learned from that to more effectively communicate up the chain and has some new ideas that he filters through his industry experience to make his team more effective. Children who get an MBA before getting a job and think they have some magic sauce that solves problems for an industry without respecting the work that's been done and knowing why those problems exist to begin with (maybe they're trade-offs? For a real reason?) are a problem, as are the clueless twats who listen to their breathless assertions as though they carry any weight.
  - hasty_pudding 3y ago
    The MBA philosophy vs the craftsman philosophy differ vastly.
    - mywittyname 3y ago
      MBAs are taught techniques for optimizing for quality and cost. It's not always an either/or decision. Even when it is an either/or situation, sometimes it's better to build a product that is half the price for a quarter of the lifespan. A buyer who will use a tool for 30 hours doesn't really care if the service life of a tool has been reduced from 1000 hours to 250 if the price is halved.
      - hasty_pudding 3y ago
        > techniques for optimizing for quality and cost Some of those techniques: 1. hiring each other and bloating bureaucracy in healthcare and education and other industries jacking up prices that werent expensive before 2. come up with ideas like 'shrinkflation' and 'planned obsolescence 3. reducing quality and making products unrepairable so we have massive waste in landfills and things like a giant pacific garbage patch 4. purchasing quality brands , parasiting the brand name, and making the actual product shitty 5. hollowing out every industry in quality and jobs...making private equity monopolies so theres no competition and then hiring more MBAs. What you call 'optimizing quality and cost' I call 'trying the fuck the consumer to the maximum amount without them noticing'. But, to be fair, those are the same thing. Just my observations. Capitalism is becoming a zombie and MBAs are the cordyceps.
adolph 3y ago
Agreed and to clarify: > everything in inches, foot pounds, and what not doesn't translate very well internationally when you start outsourcing It translates pretty well for the last 90 years: In 1930, the British Standards Institution adopted an inch of exactly 25.4 mm. The American Standards Association followed suit in 1933. By 1935, industry in 16 countries had adopted the "industrial inch" as it came to be known, effectively endorsing Johansson's pragmatic choice of conversion ratio. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inch See also the paragraph above referencing the precision tools enabled by Swede Carl Johansson's "Jo Blocks." For a nice video/contextual storytelling, see Machine Learning channel's Origins of Precision: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNRnrn5DE58 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNRnrn5DE58
cityofdelusion 3y ago
The metric system wasn’t a factor, it was all economics as laid out in the article. Tooling both foreign and domestic was/is a mixture of imperial and metric to meet certain markets. The major force behind machining, automotive, did their conversions to metric back in the 1970s. The U.S. was seriously lacking in computerized machining and had plenty of time to shift to metric based machines, but the MBAs had already determined long before that they preferred overseas manufacturing at a fraction of the cost. Machining today is heavy metric, even in the U.S. and there is still no economic way to make it all work, much like with steel production and other manufacturing concerns.
- mywittyname 3y ago
  > Machining today is heavy metric, even in the U.S. Likely due to the dominance of metric tooling from abroad. Old ass machine equipment is imperial and is still in use. Imperial measuring devices are still widely available as well. I think the OP is probably onto something.
- rvba 3y ago
  The MBAs probably did not want to invest into anything. I see it all the time, it feels like they never thing more than one year ahead.
bawana 3y ago
Wait till you see what the MBAs have cooked up for health care. You'll die in the Emergency Room waiting room. Even concierge medicine wont save you.
citizenpaul 3y ago
I've long been sounding the alarm on MBA'ification destroying everything. To me its the most under discussed problem with society in better quality of life areas. In the beginning they cleaned up messy, inefficient, wasteful processes. However for the most part MBA's ran out of real stuff to do 10-20 years ago. Ever since then it has just been about how much more can they shave off of 0.1% of 0.1% of just one more thing that doesnt need it but hey they have a quartly bonus attached. Or like a comedian I recently saw said, every new business these days are basically something like: Hey you know how a taxi driver can afford to feed his family? What if he couldn't anymore?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

cpursley 3y ago

MBA thinking ruins everything it touches. Boeing is another example. It's all about short-term profits over long term sustainability.

lasermike026 3y ago
Fire all the MBAs.
mobilio 3y ago
also HP...

baron816 3y ago

> Constant pressure to hit quarterly performance targets meant that machine quality often suffered. It’s not necessarily the case that greedy, ignorant MBAs came in and ruined everything. Like, if their practices were so inferior, then any domestic firm that didn’t get taken over by them should’ve had a leg up and could’ve dominated the domestic market. Don’t you think the more likely source of “pressure” was the international suppliers who had lower costs? > Aided by Reagan policy to aggressively outsource manufacturing from the nineteen eighties US manufacturing just imploded. Was the policy to outsource everything, or liberalize markets and let firms and consumers more freely choose where to buy things from? Globalization has done quite a lot to lift people out of poverty and keep prices low.

lesuorac 3y ago
> Like, if their practices were so inferior, then any domestic firm that didn’t get taken over by them should’ve had a leg up and could’ve dominated the domestic market. There aren't infinite firms. Plus in the article, the previous paragraph goes into how the tooling industry was being bought up by conglomerates so the finite firms became even easier to count. A company fitting your argument is Telsa. The existing firms weren't willing to canabalize their existing product lines so they didn't invest into EVs and now a domestic firm is eating at their market share. However, "Who killed the electric car?" is from 2006, there has been a lot of pent up demand for EVs that no domestic firm was selling to. However, something also fitting your argument is Moneyball [1][2]. It's not until the 2002 season that teams start to use statistics to determine who to staff their roasters? The League is from 1876; it took 126 years of baseball before a team figured out how to use math! > Don’t you think the more likely source of “pressure” was the international suppliers who had lower costs? Well, the article agrees in that it says "By now, tools from Japan and other countries were as good as or better than US tools, not to mention cheaper and more reliable.". However, R&D was also being cut prior to this so if you don't do any R&D and your products become uncompetitive it's probably because R&D was cut. > Was the policy to outsource everything, or liberalize markets and let firms and consumers more freely choose where to buy things from? Well, don't forget there are winners and losers when trading. In this case the losers are the American Tooling Industry; the winners were everybody that bought from them lol. -- I do think this growth every quarter is a big problem though. The early observers of business cycle all noticed that it has its ups and downs. Pretending that there won't be a down and fudging the numbers so that you don't have any downs is going to cause future problems. Delivering not-finished lathes counts to me as fudging the numbers. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moneyball_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moneyball_(film) [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabermetrics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabermetrics

hasty_pudding 3y ago

> In short, the MBAs happened This describes many many things in the USA.

depereo 3y ago
MBAs are fine, honestly. I have a manager who came up in the industry he works in. He worked at the 'coal-face', understands the issues and has real perspective. He got an MBA later in his career and uses what he learned from that to more effectively communicate up the chain and has some new ideas that he filters through his industry experience to make his team more effective. Children who get an MBA before getting a job and think they have some magic sauce that solves problems for an industry without respecting the work that's been done and knowing why those problems exist to begin with (maybe they're trade-offs? For a real reason?) are a problem, as are the clueless twats who listen to their breathless assertions as though they carry any weight.
- hasty_pudding 3y ago
  The MBA philosophy vs the craftsman philosophy differ vastly.
  - mywittyname 3y ago
    MBAs are taught techniques for optimizing for quality and cost. It's not always an either/or decision. Even when it is an either/or situation, sometimes it's better to build a product that is half the price for a quarter of the lifespan. A buyer who will use a tool for 30 hours doesn't really care if the service life of a tool has been reduced from 1000 hours to 250 if the price is halved.
    - hasty_pudding 3y ago
      > techniques for optimizing for quality and cost Some of those techniques: 1. hiring each other and bloating bureaucracy in healthcare and education and other industries jacking up prices that werent expensive before 2. come up with ideas like 'shrinkflation' and 'planned obsolescence 3. reducing quality and making products unrepairable so we have massive waste in landfills and things like a giant pacific garbage patch 4. purchasing quality brands , parasiting the brand name, and making the actual product shitty 5. hollowing out every industry in quality and jobs...making private equity monopolies so theres no competition and then hiring more MBAs. What you call 'optimizing quality and cost' I call 'trying the fuck the consumer to the maximum amount without them noticing'. But, to be fair, those are the same thing. Just my observations. Capitalism is becoming a zombie and MBAs are the cordyceps.

adolph 3y ago

Agreed and to clarify: > everything in inches, foot pounds, and what not doesn't translate very well internationally when you start outsourcing It translates pretty well for the last 90 years: In 1930, the British Standards Institution adopted an inch of exactly 25.4 mm. The American Standards Association followed suit in 1933. By 1935, industry in 16 countries had adopted the "industrial inch" as it came to be known, effectively endorsing Johansson's pragmatic choice of conversion ratio. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inch See also the paragraph above referencing the precision tools enabled by Swede Carl Johansson's "Jo Blocks." For a nice video/contextual storytelling, see Machine Learning channel's Origins of Precision: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNRnrn5DE58 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNRnrn5DE58

cityofdelusion 3y ago

The metric system wasn’t a factor, it was all economics as laid out in the article. Tooling both foreign and domestic was/is a mixture of imperial and metric to meet certain markets. The major force behind machining, automotive, did their conversions to metric back in the 1970s. The U.S. was seriously lacking in computerized machining and had plenty of time to shift to metric based machines, but the MBAs had already determined long before that they preferred overseas manufacturing at a fraction of the cost. Machining today is heavy metric, even in the U.S. and there is still no economic way to make it all work, much like with steel production and other manufacturing concerns.

mywittyname 3y ago
> Machining today is heavy metric, even in the U.S. Likely due to the dominance of metric tooling from abroad. Old ass machine equipment is imperial and is still in use. Imperial measuring devices are still widely available as well. I think the OP is probably onto something.
rvba 3y ago
The MBAs probably did not want to invest into anything. I see it all the time, it feels like they never thing more than one year ahead.

bawana 3y ago

Wait till you see what the MBAs have cooked up for health care. You'll die in the Emergency Room waiting room. Even concierge medicine wont save you.

citizenpaul 3y ago

I've long been sounding the alarm on MBA'ification destroying everything. To me its the most under discussed problem with society in better quality of life areas. In the beginning they cleaned up messy, inefficient, wasteful processes. However for the most part MBA's ran out of real stuff to do 10-20 years ago. Ever since then it has just been about how much more can they shave off of 0.1% of 0.1% of just one more thing that doesnt need it but hey they have a quartly bonus attached. Or like a comedian I recently saw said, every new business these days are basically something like: Hey you know how a taxi driver can afford to feed his family? What if he couldn't anymore?

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]