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Pay attention to the language - ‘Boeing needed cash to assuage it’s shareholders and executives’ What does it mean? It presents Boeing as a ‘separate’ entity t
by ClumsyPilot 3y ago
Pay attention to the language - ‘Boeing needed cash to assuage it’s shareholders and executives’
What does it mean? It presents Boeing as a ‘separate’ entity that has to throw a bone to shareholders and executives. But they are Boeing, they own it and run it. There is no separation.
A more accurate way to describe it would be to say that the owners of Boeing decided to pillage the company and put money into their own pocket - sell factories and do share buybacks. Get rid of talent, etc. The exact same thing is happening across the board, in every company in the west, American railways, water companies in UK, and now it has come for us, it’s happening in google and Microsoft.
They are run by executives who know nothing about airplanes / engineering and don’t give a shit.
We are catering to financialisation and killing the real economy. The idea that when financial institutions make money that’s the main thing in the economy will spell our doom.
I recently saw a report from a financial institution that predicts that if climate change causes water shortages and farming losses, the impact on economy will be 5%. because the share of farming in the economy is about that much. They have little appreciation for knock on effects.
The finance industry is not run by people who are smarter than the rest of us, it is run by people detached from reality who never pay the price of their mistakes, as happened in 2008
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> run by executives who know nothing about airplanes / engineering Dennis Mullenberg and Jack Welch were pillaging executives and engineers. The myth of engineering management being inherently incorruptible is empirically misplaced.
- AnimalMuppet 3y agoWhy does everyone rip on Jack Welch here? Was he ever a Boeing exec?
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> Why does everyone rip on Jack Welch here? Was he ever a Boeing exec? He was an engineer and an exercise. There is this myth in Silicon Valley about how MBAs and engineers behave in the C suite. It’s empirically unsupported, albeit a satisfying story to tell.
- AnimalMuppet 3y agoOK, but why does Welch come up so often in Boeing articles? It's like there's this meme that "What happened to Boeing is all Jack Welch's fault!" It comes up over and over and over, and from multiple authors. Why?
- toomanyrichies 3y agoJames McNerney, the CEO of Boeing who oversaw the development of the 737 MAX, was one of Jack Welch's underlings (along with eventual Home Depot CEO Robert Nardelli and Welch's successor as CEO of GE, Jeff Immelt). [1][2] 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_McNerney https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_McNerney 2. https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-boeing-was-set-on-the-path-to-disaster-by-the-cult-of-jack-welch https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-boeing-was-set-on-the-path...
- p_l 3y agoThe exec brought from McDonnell-Douglas, who was also an adviser to Phil Condit when certain changes (the 7E7 aka 787 program goals and planning, outsourcing strategy, HQ change) were done, and who later replaced Condit as CEO, was well known for being Jack Welch acolyte. In fact, you can find Jack Welch "acolytes" all over 1990s execs and management and even later, because he was that influential.
- life-and-quiet 3y agoThis is super important. It reminds me of the line from "Succession," when Brian Cox says, "The Ford Motor company is barely real. It's a shorthand for a set of financial interests." We use the word "Boeing" as if it is a real thing. In fact it is a set (as well as many subsets) of individuals pursuing a variety of goals. When we say "Boeing" quote "lost its way," maybe that is reasonable language for the entirety of the Boeing corporation. But you can just as easily say, "How Boeing willfully endangered the lives of its passengers by cutting corners" if you're referring to the subset of individuals who command Boeing and created this set of incentives.