11 ms·
Boeing's problems could be solved if they cleared all of the McDonnell Douglas accountants and MBAs from upper management and went back to being a company run b
by mikece 3y ago
Boeing's problems could be solved if they cleared all of the McDonnell Douglas accountants and MBAs from upper management and went back to being a company run by engineers who created fantastic aircraft designed by engineers (not focus groups) and on schedules set by the engineers. Sadly it might be too late for that.
- drooopy 3y agoIs that kind of 180 even possible anymore after being "married" to McDonnell Douglas for nearly 30 years?
- mikece 3y agoIt will probably require Chapter 11 at a minimum, which, at the rate things are going, isn't out of the question.
- tcbawo 3y agoIf a Private Equity group decided to buy them out and restructure, it would make a fascinating case study. If some radical restructuring does happen, I hope they bring along a film crew to make a documentary in the process.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- salawat 3y agoJesus. Do you want us all to die? Private Equity might as well be the hand of Death themself. Literally so when they get their hands on hospitals. https://arstechnica.com/health/2024/01/hospitals-slash-staff-services-quality-of-care-when-private-equity-takes-over/ https://arstechnica.com/health/2024/01/hospitals-slash-staff...
- tcbawo 3y agoNot advocating. Very few companies can be overhauled in a significant way while remaining public. Boeing is a strategically important company from an economic and military perspective, so I have to imagine it will be treated as a special case.
- tivert 3y ago> If a Private Equity group decided to buy them out and restructure, it would make a fascinating case study. I don't know if you're being sarcastic, but my impression is private equity makes the same kind of detrimental changes that Boeing has already been making. IIRC, they're known for cost cutting and cashing out goodwill, not making expensive culture changes to pursue engineering excellence.
- aaomidi 3y agoProbably with nationalization.
- Dr_Birdbrain 3y agoWould that help at this point? Or has the culture fundamentally been changed?
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> MBAs Friendly reminder that Boeing has recently had a series (EDIT: one, also terrible) of engineers as CEOs. The MBA trope is a noughties-era Silicon Valley meme.
- MattGaiser 3y agoI see one. The current CEO is an accountant. While he went to Virginia Tech, it wasn't for engineering. The prior CEO was an engineer. CEO before that was an MBA with an American Studies degree. He oversaw the MAX program.
- JumpCrisscross 3y agoRight, undergraduate physicist (Stonecipher), MBA (McNerney), engineer (Mullenberg) and now an accountant (Calhoun). Jack Welch, similarly, was a chemical engineer. (I was counting Stonecipher in my series, but you’re right.) Plenty have looked for the connection. It hasn’t surfaced. The problem is short-term incentives, a lack of a principled culture and corruption. We each like to think our in group is immune from those forces, and some certainly are more than others, but none in totality.
- andix 3y agoI don't think there is an easy fix for a very complicated problem.
- empath-nirvana 3y agoProbably the right fix is creating some competition that drives them out of business.
- ortusdux 3y agoSteve Jobs: "It turns out the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies, like IBM or Xerox. If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or computer. So what? When you have monopoly market share, the company's not any more successful. So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product. They have no conception of the craftsmanship that's required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts, usually, about wanting to really help the customers."
- elromulous 3y agoWouldn't this apply to today's Apple?
- zeroonetwothree 3y agoHow is Apple a monopoly?
- nativeit 3y agoIn much the same way Boeing is—they are one of only two options.
- paxys 3y agoThe merger happened 30 years ago, and in fact some of Boeing's best and most successful years as a company were well after that. All the executives and "accountants and MBAs" behind it have long retired. It's time for people to stop blaming the McDonnell Douglas boogeyman and accept the fact that Boeing has simply been going down in management, quality, QA, accountability and more for many years now. For example downsizing their Washington manufacturing facilities and outsourcing critical R&D to cheaper countries didn't come from McDonnell Douglas.
- Dalewyn 3y agoThank you, McDouglas Man Bad is a tired meme. The problem is Boeing.
- epolanski 3y agoBut the behaviour hasn't changed. Aggressive stock buy backs while losing billions and poor culture are still there.
- Dalewyn 3y agoDo we blame a company that ceased to exist 27 years ago for the problems of today? Protecting Boeing from blame is precisely the opposite of what we should be doing. The problem is Boeing.
- AnimalMuppet 3y agoWe may (justly) blame the problems of today on the culture change that the merger brought. But that gives us no way forward, and 27 years later, there's no way of un-scrambling the egg. To fix Boeing, we're going to have to start with the Boeing we have now.
- Kon-Peki 3y ago> there's no way of un-scrambling the egg. As usual, there's a kids educational show to drive the concept home (fast forward to 3:30 for the meat of it): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Wegg7ewXC8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Wegg7ewXC8 With the associated music video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAAnGjjCI5M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAAnGjjCI5M
- lolinder 3y agoThe CEO who stepped down during the MAX crashes held two engineering degrees (no MBA) and started as an engineer at Boeing well before the McDonnell Douglas merger [0]. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Muilenburg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Muilenburg
- tonyhb 3y agoHe was CEO from 2015 onwards. The MAX' first flight was 2016. It's safe to say that Dennis didn't have a say in greenlighting the MAX program, unless he was such an impactful CEO that he could greenlight MAX and get the plane built in a year, in which — well, good job? It turns out that during the max program, Dennis was managing Boeing's security division. Pointing to Dennis as a failure of an "engineering CEO" because of the MAX incident isn't accurate.
- lolinder 3y agoFor the MCAS problems I'm far less interested in when the plane was developed than I am in when the decision was made to not properly train pilots on the MCAS system. According to the Seattle Times [0], it was in 2016 that MCAS was made more powerful and it was determined that a 10-second reaction time would be required to avoid catastrophe. In that year, in spite of the fact that they changed MCAS, they did not submit the new hazard assessment documents to the FAA. That article also seems to indicate that it was after 2016 that they scrubbed all references to MCAS from the manual. [0] https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/inspector-general-report-details-how-boeing-played-down-mcas-in-original-737-max-certification-and-faa-missed-it/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/inspe...
- tonyhb 3y agoI hear you, and there's relatively little literature on what making MCAS more powerful means. You might assume that this was after the first test flight (also 2016), and that the lead engineer on the system decided to increase the lift MCAS applies after a real-world test. Would they run that by the CEO? Surely not. Was the MCAS system already approved before Dennis? Yea. Would Dennis take a massive risk by cancelling a 6 year project as he became CEO? Definitely. He's between a rock and a hard place. I can't see that he's at fault. The people who are at fault are the ones who green lit. IIRC, that was an MBA CEO, obviously in tandem with an engineering team who came up with the idea.
- renegade-otter 3y agoBoeing IS McDonnell Douglas.
- iso8859-1 3y agoNo, McDonnell Douglas made much better planes. The Mad Dog nickname came not only from its MD initials but also because it took off like a rocket and makes a hell of a lot of noise. Unlike later automated planes, the Mad Dog also needs full hands-on attention from the pilot during takeoff and landing. (i.e. doesn't kill you with MCAS) Source: https://simpleflying.com/why-was-the-md-80-called-the-mad-dog/ https://simpleflying.com/why-was-the-md-80-called-the-mad-do...
- bitcharmer 3y ago> Boeing's problems could be solved if they cleared all of the McDonnell Douglas accountants and MBAs But then they'd be providing value to the clients and not shareholders. We can't have that, can we.