8 ms·

Fire the board and put an actual engineer in the CEO seat until the company gets fixed. The wrong culture of people are in charge and until this is addressed su

Fire the board and put an actual engineer in the CEO seat until the company gets fixed. The wrong culture of people are in charge and until this is addressed substantively there won’t be change. Radical action is required or the company could be destroyed.

passwordoops 3y ago
And criminal negligence charges. There needs to be a solid message sent to the quarterly-bonus profiteers
- ChatGTP 3y ago
  Boeing is in bed with the DOD, this is never going to happen.
  - passwordoops 3y ago
    Not necessarily. The moment these issues hit critical systems you'll see a change. DoD officials have already sounded the alarm on monopoly in general: https://www.defenseone.com/business/2021/02/hicks-warns-against-extreme-consolidation-defense-industry/171811/ https://www.defenseone.com/business/2021/02/hicks-warns-agai...
    - willcipriano 3y ago
      The DoD has lost trillions of dollars of equipment. They will rattle sabers until their grandson gets a no show job.
      - lovich 3y ago
        Billions I might believe over their history. Trillions id need to see some evidence of. Especially if “lost” is including combat losses
        willcipriano 3y ago
        https://breakingdefense.com/2023/11/with-trillions-at-play-pentagon-fails-audit-for-sixth-year-in-a-row/ https://breakingdefense.com/2023/11/with-trillions-at-play-p... Billions were lost just in the humvees that were gifted to the Taliban recently.
        nebula8804 3y ago
        There has got to be some way to fix this problem. How is it that as a society we have collectively built up so much bureaucracy and bloat that causes this?
        lovich 3y ago
        It literally wasn’t worth it to return? I might have a biased view of this site but I thought we were mostly engineers who understood how complicated a “simple” change could be. Logistics for physical goods is hard enough for coordinating moving items from a factory to a front which is order -> chaos. Moving from a war front back to storage is going from chaos -> order and significantly harder. Either way, still not trillions to my original point
  - j16sdiz 3y ago
    Can't see why not. Charging a single person in boeing is not the same as bringing down the whole company
RandomLensman 3y ago
I don't think you need an engineer as CEO for that. Might on the margins help but other things such as ability to change processes or reporting lines might matter more. If you want cultural change you need a CEO that wants that and knows how to get there - which is not an engineering problem.
- st-keller 3y ago
  „Cultural change is not an engineering problem“ - cannot count how often i heared this. But if you want to have an „engineering culture“ - let an engineer handle it! But why would anyone whish to hange to said „engineering culture“ if no engineer is around?
  - RandomLensman 3y ago
    Why would it need to be an "engineering culture" as opposed to, for example, a "quality culture"? And even if you want to former, why does it need an engineer to create that culture? Does a good movie director also need to be a good writer or actor?
    - jsharf 3y ago
      I assume it’s easier to find an engineer who went to engineering school to learn how to build airplanes that are safe than it is to find an MBA who went to business school to learn how to build planes that are safe. (It’s not about the knowledge but about the root desire) Similarly, I assume it’s harder to find an engineer who went into the field purely for money. I do think on average engineers will prioritize safety (since they likely understand failure modes and production and long tail statistics better. We literally have to take engineering ethics classes), at the cost of doing a worse job at running the business. But when the business requires this level of safety, that IS doing a good job.
      - RandomLensman 3y ago
        You need to be able to steer a large and complex organisation - being an engineer has nothing to do with that. And, yes, incentives matter, but those can be set.
spydum 3y ago
People busting on the past and current CEOs, and for sure they deserve it.. however in my experience, many of these decisions happen at the board level. The Boeing board of directors need to be replaced, and held accountable for allowing quality measure to drop (for whatever the cause: outsourcing or pure cost cutting/staff skills). But instead, as is so common in corporate politics, we pick a figure head like the CEO to be sacrificed, while the root problems don't get solved.
- croes 3y ago
  >we pick a figure head like the CEO to be sacrificed Isn't that the reason why they earn so much money because they "take" the risks?
  - Sebb767 3y ago
    The point being made here is that sacrificing the CEO does not solve the problems in the company and is completely unrelated to their pay.
    - bsuvc 3y ago
      It does solve the problem. Leaders need be held accountable, not to fix the past, but so that other leaders will make better decisions in the future. In this case, it is a lesson that if you destroy your engineering culture and sacrifice quality, you will lose your job.
- stingraycharles 3y ago
  The parent you’re replying to started his statement with “fire the board”. So I think they are agreeing with you.
- cedws 3y ago
  This is how capitalism works, right? Public companies are under a constant squeeze. Profit, profit, profit. Growth, growth, growth. If the CEO doesn't deliver they get removed and the board simply installs a new one. The growth machine must never stop, even at the expense of employees and customers. Experienced, knowledgeable employees costing too much? Get rid of them. Q2 profits fell short of expectations? Hike the prices. Supplier too expensive? Find another one.
maeln 3y ago
For me this argument always made 0 sense. Dennis Muilenburg was a engineer through and through, and he did pretty much all his career at Boeing. But this is during his time as CEO that all the previous issues with the 737 Max arose, which led to him being fired. You want an engineer CEO, you got one and it didn't help anything. Because that's not what a CEO does in any case. At this level of management, especially in those huge company, you are so far removed from the craft that it is really irrelevant if you have any experience in it. I think, it is way more important to look at the actual owner of Boeing and its general environment. Boeing is now mostly owned by big institutional investment firm [0], and they are the one who choose the CEO. Boeing is also one of the most insanely protected company in the U.S. Whatever Boeing does, the U.S government will always be here to make sure Boeing stays dominant and make life very difficult for any competitor. The situation with the 737 Max was actually a good example where the FAA and the U.S Govt was again very lenient with Boeing, and just gave them a slap on the wrist. So if you were the owner of such company, why not abuse this amount of protection ? Why not push for the maximum profitability at the cost of quality ? If Boeing received more than just a slap in the wrist for the previous 737 Max fuck-up, they would be way more inclined to reevaluate their whole quality process and make sure no incident every happen. [0] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/insights/052116/top-3-boeing-shareholders-ba.asp https://www.investopedia.com/articles/insights/052116/top-3-...
- HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
  The point is that Quality flows from the top down. If the people on top of the organization don't take it seriously, then it's hard for the actual working engineers to get the support they need to do their jobs. Having an engineer as the CEO at least makes it likely that that person understands what is needed and makes it happen. It's not a guarantee, but I'd trust an engineering organization with an engineer at the helm a lot more than someone with a sales background.
  - beAbU 3y ago
    The point of the previous poster stands. They /had/ an engineer CEO and that did not mean shit.
sseveran 3y ago
They had an engineer as CEO. That one did not work out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Muilenburg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Muilenburg
jillesvangurp 3y ago
Two planes crashed. That's four years ago and that was root caused to a single issue which has since been addressed. Before that the 737 had a great safety record. In fact it still does. Not perfect but pretty amazing considering it's the most widely use plane ever produced. After that there have been a few incidents, including the non fatal one with the door. But nothing out of the ordinary. Here's a list of all the incidents with the 737 over the years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incidents_involving_the_Boeing_737 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident... If anything, this decade is looking pretty good so far. I'm not saying there's nothing going on at Boeing in terms of management and quality control. But hadn't it been for the issues a few years ago, this would barely register in the news as anything else than the minor incident this was. But because that was in the news, now any Boeing related news is causing world + dog to panic. And that apparently includes FAA leadership and management at major airlines. They are apparently more worried about how it reflects on them than about the actual facts. I think the grounding of the aircraft has much more to do with politics and appearances than with actual safety. It was premature and probably overkill. People insisting on expensive audits and other draconian measures have basically persuaded the FAA to do what they otherwise wouldn't dream of doing: ground loads of planes over an issue that can probably be excluded with a simple, straightforward inspection. There hasn't been a lot of detail about what exactly went wrong. Nobody waited for that to be revealed even. But I bet it's something straight forward like a missing bolt or something similarly easy to check and verify. If you are an airline and you own anything even mildly resembling a 737 and you haven't at this point checked if the bloody doors are fine, you should not be operating planes at all. At least, claiming ignorance after all the attention in the news is not a thing. You shouldn't be waiting for the FAA to tell you to do this as it's both obvious and you are responsible for your fleet.
- snapcaster 3y ago
  On one hand I agree with you that people are likely overreacting, but i disagree that anyone is acting irrationally. Boeing has lost _all_ credibility amongst the public and we're not all aviation experts so we don't know that a 4-bolt-gap is fine or whatever their current issue is. >But hadn't it been for the issues a few years ago By "issues" you mean hundreds of people being killed by a known manufacturing/training issue? Where does your faith in these people come from?
dotnet00 3y ago
Putting in an engineer at the top alone won't fix endemic culture issues. You'd have to do a more in-depth rethinking of all the processes and purge all the penny pinching cruft. But that isn't palatable to shareholders so it won't happen.
- happytiger 3y ago
  Maybe by replacing the board? The CEO was his own chairman from 2016-2019, so there’s that too… Getting back to basics around following procedure and having a single process sure would have helped in this situation. Just read what the leaker actually wrote. It’s a comical parody of a company that’s off track and not empowering engineering to set boundaries on procedure. So if you don’t address the executives in charge and bring in someone who will change the situation, which this board and CEO have utterly failed to do and in fact have made worse since 2019, who is going to change that?
- FredPret 3y ago
  I’m not so sure that it won’t be palatable. It’s not like their strategy is making money - Boeing has lost a ton of money for years now. https://valustox.com/BA https://valustox.com/BA If you told shareholders you’ll fix the crisis shown in the plummeting profit graphs above, I’m sure they’d vote for it.
bigbillheck 3y ago
If you check the historical record you'll find that Boeing has had a long history of making defective planes.
tarsinge 3y ago
In the current economy who cares if the company is destroyed? Shareholders with insider knowledge will already have reduced their exposure. See what PE firms are doing, only thing that matters is ROI. I don’t see how it will change until we go back to pre-Reagan times, I.e. companies purpose are not just to make money for shareholders.
zipper234 3y ago
The culture has to be changed. CEO pay is completely out of whack, giving early retirement to higher paid engineers so Boeing can hire people at lower wages, moving parts of the manufacturing to areas that do not have Labor Unions, putting the screws on manufactures so they cannot make a decent profit. Is this corporate America. We need an airplane manufacturer in the US, but I say fire the Board and the CEO. Maybe those who want to protect Boeing should talk to families who lost relatives on the 2 fatal crashes. Shame on Boeing leadership. It all started with the merger of Boeing and McDonnell Douglas. Management was not willing to go back to the drawing board and now look at the cost.
zipper234 3y ago
Fire the CEO and the Board. This all started with the merger of Boeing and McDonnell Douglas. Profit above all else. Just like Jack Welch of GE. It is pathetic. Take all the money and squeeze the bottom. Retire experienced engineers and hire new ones with less experience and lower pay. Move manufacturing so you will not have Labor Unions to worry about. Squeeze companies suppling parts so they do not have a fair profit. It is pathetic. We all must demand change. I am flying overseas but not on a Boeing plane. And my heart goes out to families who lost loved ones in the 2 fatal crashes.
jimnotgym 3y ago
Why? Because engineers have naturally better morality when faced with performance related pay than MBAs? Because engineers are morally superior? There are several engineers on the board of Boeing already. The non engineers had long careers at Boeing or other aerospace companies.
delfinom 3y ago
There was an actual engineer as CEO. They threw him under the bus for the 737 Max because 3 years in on the job and he was starting to ruffle the feathers of McDonnell Douglas.

passwordoops 3y ago

And criminal negligence charges. There needs to be a solid message sent to the quarterly-bonus profiteers

ChatGTP 3y ago
Boeing is in bed with the DOD, this is never going to happen.
- passwordoops 3y ago
  Not necessarily. The moment these issues hit critical systems you'll see a change. DoD officials have already sounded the alarm on monopoly in general: https://www.defenseone.com/business/2021/02/hicks-warns-against-extreme-consolidation-defense-industry/171811/ https://www.defenseone.com/business/2021/02/hicks-warns-agai...
  - willcipriano 3y ago
    The DoD has lost trillions of dollars of equipment. They will rattle sabers until their grandson gets a no show job.
    - lovich 3y ago
      Billions I might believe over their history. Trillions id need to see some evidence of. Especially if “lost” is including combat losses
      - willcipriano 3y ago
        https://breakingdefense.com/2023/11/with-trillions-at-play-pentagon-fails-audit-for-sixth-year-in-a-row/ https://breakingdefense.com/2023/11/with-trillions-at-play-p... Billions were lost just in the humvees that were gifted to the Taliban recently.
        nebula8804 3y ago
        There has got to be some way to fix this problem. How is it that as a society we have collectively built up so much bureaucracy and bloat that causes this?
        lovich 3y ago
        It literally wasn’t worth it to return? I might have a biased view of this site but I thought we were mostly engineers who understood how complicated a “simple” change could be. Logistics for physical goods is hard enough for coordinating moving items from a factory to a front which is order -> chaos. Moving from a war front back to storage is going from chaos -> order and significantly harder. Either way, still not trillions to my original point
- j16sdiz 3y ago
  Can't see why not. Charging a single person in boeing is not the same as bringing down the whole company

RandomLensman 3y ago

I don't think you need an engineer as CEO for that. Might on the margins help but other things such as ability to change processes or reporting lines might matter more. If you want cultural change you need a CEO that wants that and knows how to get there - which is not an engineering problem.

st-keller 3y ago
„Cultural change is not an engineering problem“ - cannot count how often i heared this. But if you want to have an „engineering culture“ - let an engineer handle it! But why would anyone whish to hange to said „engineering culture“ if no engineer is around?
- RandomLensman 3y ago
  Why would it need to be an "engineering culture" as opposed to, for example, a "quality culture"? And even if you want to former, why does it need an engineer to create that culture? Does a good movie director also need to be a good writer or actor?
  - jsharf 3y ago
    I assume it’s easier to find an engineer who went to engineering school to learn how to build airplanes that are safe than it is to find an MBA who went to business school to learn how to build planes that are safe. (It’s not about the knowledge but about the root desire) Similarly, I assume it’s harder to find an engineer who went into the field purely for money. I do think on average engineers will prioritize safety (since they likely understand failure modes and production and long tail statistics better. We literally have to take engineering ethics classes), at the cost of doing a worse job at running the business. But when the business requires this level of safety, that IS doing a good job.
    - RandomLensman 3y ago
      You need to be able to steer a large and complex organisation - being an engineer has nothing to do with that. And, yes, incentives matter, but those can be set.

spydum 3y ago

People busting on the past and current CEOs, and for sure they deserve it.. however in my experience, many of these decisions happen at the board level. The Boeing board of directors need to be replaced, and held accountable for allowing quality measure to drop (for whatever the cause: outsourcing or pure cost cutting/staff skills). But instead, as is so common in corporate politics, we pick a figure head like the CEO to be sacrificed, while the root problems don't get solved.

croes 3y ago
>we pick a figure head like the CEO to be sacrificed Isn't that the reason why they earn so much money because they "take" the risks?
- Sebb767 3y ago
  The point being made here is that sacrificing the CEO does not solve the problems in the company and is completely unrelated to their pay.
  - bsuvc 3y ago
    It does solve the problem. Leaders need be held accountable, not to fix the past, but so that other leaders will make better decisions in the future. In this case, it is a lesson that if you destroy your engineering culture and sacrifice quality, you will lose your job.
stingraycharles 3y ago
The parent you’re replying to started his statement with “fire the board”. So I think they are agreeing with you.
cedws 3y ago
This is how capitalism works, right? Public companies are under a constant squeeze. Profit, profit, profit. Growth, growth, growth. If the CEO doesn't deliver they get removed and the board simply installs a new one. The growth machine must never stop, even at the expense of employees and customers. Experienced, knowledgeable employees costing too much? Get rid of them. Q2 profits fell short of expectations? Hike the prices. Supplier too expensive? Find another one.

maeln 3y ago

For me this argument always made 0 sense. Dennis Muilenburg was a engineer through and through, and he did pretty much all his career at Boeing. But this is during his time as CEO that all the previous issues with the 737 Max arose, which led to him being fired. You want an engineer CEO, you got one and it didn't help anything. Because that's not what a CEO does in any case. At this level of management, especially in those huge company, you are so far removed from the craft that it is really irrelevant if you have any experience in it. I think, it is way more important to look at the actual owner of Boeing and its general environment. Boeing is now mostly owned by big institutional investment firm [0], and they are the one who choose the CEO. Boeing is also one of the most insanely protected company in the U.S. Whatever Boeing does, the U.S government will always be here to make sure Boeing stays dominant and make life very difficult for any competitor. The situation with the 737 Max was actually a good example where the FAA and the U.S Govt was again very lenient with Boeing, and just gave them a slap on the wrist. So if you were the owner of such company, why not abuse this amount of protection ? Why not push for the maximum profitability at the cost of quality ? If Boeing received more than just a slap in the wrist for the previous 737 Max fuck-up, they would be way more inclined to reevaluate their whole quality process and make sure no incident every happen. [0] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/insights/052116/top-3-boeing-shareholders-ba.asp https://www.investopedia.com/articles/insights/052116/top-3-...

HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
The point is that Quality flows from the top down. If the people on top of the organization don't take it seriously, then it's hard for the actual working engineers to get the support they need to do their jobs. Having an engineer as the CEO at least makes it likely that that person understands what is needed and makes it happen. It's not a guarantee, but I'd trust an engineering organization with an engineer at the helm a lot more than someone with a sales background.
- beAbU 3y ago
  The point of the previous poster stands. They /had/ an engineer CEO and that did not mean shit.

sseveran 3y ago

They had an engineer as CEO. That one did not work out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Muilenburg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Muilenburg

jillesvangurp 3y ago

Two planes crashed. That's four years ago and that was root caused to a single issue which has since been addressed. Before that the 737 had a great safety record. In fact it still does. Not perfect but pretty amazing considering it's the most widely use plane ever produced. After that there have been a few incidents, including the non fatal one with the door. But nothing out of the ordinary. Here's a list of all the incidents with the 737 over the years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incidents_involving_the_Boeing_737 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident... If anything, this decade is looking pretty good so far. I'm not saying there's nothing going on at Boeing in terms of management and quality control. But hadn't it been for the issues a few years ago, this would barely register in the news as anything else than the minor incident this was. But because that was in the news, now any Boeing related news is causing world + dog to panic. And that apparently includes FAA leadership and management at major airlines. They are apparently more worried about how it reflects on them than about the actual facts. I think the grounding of the aircraft has much more to do with politics and appearances than with actual safety. It was premature and probably overkill. People insisting on expensive audits and other draconian measures have basically persuaded the FAA to do what they otherwise wouldn't dream of doing: ground loads of planes over an issue that can probably be excluded with a simple, straightforward inspection. There hasn't been a lot of detail about what exactly went wrong. Nobody waited for that to be revealed even. But I bet it's something straight forward like a missing bolt or something similarly easy to check and verify. If you are an airline and you own anything even mildly resembling a 737 and you haven't at this point checked if the bloody doors are fine, you should not be operating planes at all. At least, claiming ignorance after all the attention in the news is not a thing. You shouldn't be waiting for the FAA to tell you to do this as it's both obvious and you are responsible for your fleet.

snapcaster 3y ago
On one hand I agree with you that people are likely overreacting, but i disagree that anyone is acting irrationally. Boeing has lost _all_ credibility amongst the public and we're not all aviation experts so we don't know that a 4-bolt-gap is fine or whatever their current issue is. >But hadn't it been for the issues a few years ago By "issues" you mean hundreds of people being killed by a known manufacturing/training issue? Where does your faith in these people come from?

dotnet00 3y ago

Putting in an engineer at the top alone won't fix endemic culture issues. You'd have to do a more in-depth rethinking of all the processes and purge all the penny pinching cruft. But that isn't palatable to shareholders so it won't happen.

happytiger 3y ago
Maybe by replacing the board? The CEO was his own chairman from 2016-2019, so there’s that too… Getting back to basics around following procedure and having a single process sure would have helped in this situation. Just read what the leaker actually wrote. It’s a comical parody of a company that’s off track and not empowering engineering to set boundaries on procedure. So if you don’t address the executives in charge and bring in someone who will change the situation, which this board and CEO have utterly failed to do and in fact have made worse since 2019, who is going to change that?
FredPret 3y ago
I’m not so sure that it won’t be palatable. It’s not like their strategy is making money - Boeing has lost a ton of money for years now. https://valustox.com/BA https://valustox.com/BA If you told shareholders you’ll fix the crisis shown in the plummeting profit graphs above, I’m sure they’d vote for it.

bigbillheck 3y ago

If you check the historical record you'll find that Boeing has had a long history of making defective planes.

tarsinge 3y ago

In the current economy who cares if the company is destroyed? Shareholders with insider knowledge will already have reduced their exposure. See what PE firms are doing, only thing that matters is ROI. I don’t see how it will change until we go back to pre-Reagan times, I.e. companies purpose are not just to make money for shareholders.

zipper234 3y ago

The culture has to be changed. CEO pay is completely out of whack, giving early retirement to higher paid engineers so Boeing can hire people at lower wages, moving parts of the manufacturing to areas that do not have Labor Unions, putting the screws on manufactures so they cannot make a decent profit. Is this corporate America. We need an airplane manufacturer in the US, but I say fire the Board and the CEO. Maybe those who want to protect Boeing should talk to families who lost relatives on the 2 fatal crashes. Shame on Boeing leadership. It all started with the merger of Boeing and McDonnell Douglas. Management was not willing to go back to the drawing board and now look at the cost.

zipper234 3y ago

Fire the CEO and the Board. This all started with the merger of Boeing and McDonnell Douglas. Profit above all else. Just like Jack Welch of GE. It is pathetic. Take all the money and squeeze the bottom. Retire experienced engineers and hire new ones with less experience and lower pay. Move manufacturing so you will not have Labor Unions to worry about. Squeeze companies suppling parts so they do not have a fair profit. It is pathetic. We all must demand change. I am flying overseas but not on a Boeing plane. And my heart goes out to families who lost loved ones in the 2 fatal crashes.

jimnotgym 3y ago

Why? Because engineers have naturally better morality when faced with performance related pay than MBAs? Because engineers are morally superior? There are several engineers on the board of Boeing already. The non engineers had long careers at Boeing or other aerospace companies.

delfinom 3y ago

There was an actual engineer as CEO. They threw him under the bus for the 737 Max because 3 years in on the job and he was starting to ruffle the feathers of McDonnell Douglas.