6 ms·

The 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 "account

by paxys 3y ago

The 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 ago
Thank you, McDouglas Man Bad is a tired meme. The problem is Boeing.
- epolanski 3y ago
  But the behaviour hasn't changed. Aggressive stock buy backs while losing billions and poor culture are still there.
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    Do 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 ago
      We 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
  - nradov 3y ago
    There's no reason to complain about stock buy backs. Most profitable public companies should be returning a portion of those profits to shareholders through stock buy backs.
    - renegade-otter 3y ago
      No they should not. Stock buybacks of such recklessness were not even legal until Reagan - for this exact reason. It's not good business when your stock is growing and your company is dying. In fact, it's just an accounting trick which is essentially vulture capitalism - but from the inside. https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/25/business/bed-bath-beyond-share-repurchases/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/25/business/bed-bath-beyond-shar... "The $11.8 billion Bed Bath & Beyond spent on its own stock since 2004 comes to more than twice the $5.2 billion in debt it had on its books in its most recent SEC filing, a debt load that proved crushing for the company. It left the company unable to buy the inventory required to create the sales it needed to reverse losses. “The company’s stewardship of their capital failed,” said Declan Gargan, retail director and credit analyst who follows Bed Bath & Beyond for S&P Global Ratings."
      - nradov 3y ago
        Nonsense. If the shareholders prefer to take capital out instead of reinvesting in the business there's nothing wrong with that. And if businesses sometimes die as a consequence then so what. Individual businesses have no particular right to exist indefinitely. The only reason that companies use stock buy backs instead of dividends to return capital to shareholders is double taxation. If Congress eliminated the double taxation then there would be little reason for stock buy backs.
        renegade-otter 3y ago
        Thank you for defining "broken capitalism".
        nradov 3y ago
mschuster91 3y ago
> All the executives and "accountants and MBAs" behind it have long retired. They have, but they have left the cultural infestation behind. You'd need a complete purge of Boeing's leadership, as well as a re-integration of Spirit Aerosystems.
- rayiner 3y ago
  I don’t think even that would help. Culture is self-replicating. Everyone at Boeing today was hired based on that culture and socialized into it.
- Kon-Peki 3y ago
  If you did that this afternoon, Boeing would cease to operate. There are no candidates ready and able to step in. They have to be trained, they have to gain experience, etc.
kshacker 3y ago
It is as if I read the grand and the parent comment verbatim yesterday. Deja vu or this is now the pattern for every Boeing discussion?
- bena 3y ago
  Probably, Boeing was the topic of discussion on Last Week Tonight relatively recently. We're all experts now.
renegade-otter 3y ago
And how long did it take Jack Welch to bleed GE dry? Decades. With companies this size, it doesn't happen overnight. There is a LOT built up before you that you have to systematically destroy.
pyrale 3y ago
> in fact some of Boeing's best and most successful years as a company were well after that. That's logical, isn't it? If your claim is that the company cut the long-term philosophy and squeezed short-term benefits, the most profitable time for the company is logically going to be the time where benefits go up while long-term investments are no longer made. I'm not saying that you're wrong, just that your rebuttal isn't going to convince someone thinking like that.
aaomidi 3y ago
A lot of folks don't realize that MBAification of companies does not have an immediate feedback loop. The entire point is that in the short term it does super well, with the costs being realized in the long term. Boeing's timeline of failure actually matches the trajectory of other MBAified companies.
- dangus 3y ago
  A lot of people on this forum just use the MBA as a dirty four letter word (minus one letter) without understanding what it is or what it means. There’s no such thing as being “MBAified.” An MBA is a generalist degree that contains the bare minimum information you need to operate a corporation. You know how in undergraduate computer engineering you learn many different subjects like power systems, microcontroller programming, computer programming, transistors, basic processor design, digital/analog circuit design? And how nobody is going to use all those subjects in the real world? That’s exactly what an MBA is like: it’s got subjects like corporate finance, organizational behavior, information systems management, marketing, etc. Just about nobody with an MBA is going to use ever single one of those subjects on a daily basis. Nobody else is being judged by their degree. It’s ridiculous, and kind of disgusting that people act like learning the set of knowledge contained in an MBA makes you a worse manager. Armchair engineers seem to think they could run a multi-billion dollar aircraft manufacturer using avionics engineering skills alone without understanding the concepts you learn in an MBA like inventory turnover, cash flow, global operations, or how to design the organizational structure of a company with tens of thousands of employees. In what way does an engineering degree prepare you to do that job? Imagine if you were a nurse and you got told that you were a worse nurse because you got a nursing degree. That’s what the engineer-types who dunk on MBAs are doing.
  - hughesjj 3y ago
    Agreed, I think 'jack welched' or similar would be a better term. Not all MBAs are destructive to institutions. Followers of Jack Welch mostly are.
  - elzbardico 3y ago
    Of course nobody is blaming literal MBAs. We are blaming this kind of managerial culture best symbolized by Harvard Business School and MBA programs. The whole idea that no matter what a company does, a generic degree holder, with an education heavily centered on accounting and finance can be the ultimate decision maker without taking into input any other aspect behind financials and accounting. Most business type have this misguided idea that we engineers don't value business and financial knowledge. We do, what we question is the hubris of business people that seem to believe that domain knowledge is not important, and that managing a soft-drink manufacturer is the same as manufacturing a tech company. It is not. The problem with your analogy, is that no nurse are being taught on nursing programs that all that matters is what they learn on their programs. If this happened, yes, nurses would be worse nurses by having those degrees.
rayiner 3y ago
Destroying a successful culture can happen slowly over time, but once it happens, there’s no recovery from it. That’s what seems to have happened with Boeing. The 777 was the last fully pre-merger aircraft. The 787 started right after the merger and mostly seems to have escaped the problems. But since then it’s been a shit show.
idontwantthis 3y ago
I like this idea of geriatric McDonnel Douglas vice presidents being taken out of cryosleep every few months to make a terrible engineering decision then being put back in their cabinet.
elzbardico 3y ago
MBA thinking is exactly about squeezing profits by cutting expenses. You can completely gut a company's future by doing so, while having multiple years of profits guaranteed by backlog orders. There's some kind of inertia, were bad and good decisions take some time to have their effects felt. Likewise, due to the same inertia, unless something dramatic happens, the current administration of a company is downstream the culture of previous administrations, as the people at the helm in the present were promoted, hired mostly based on the criteria of the the last past dramatical cultural change, that was the managerial takeover by the MD bureaucrats post-merge.
whalesalad 3y ago
McDonnell Douglas was when Boeing went to shit.

by paxys 3y ago

Dalewyn 3y ago

Thank you, McDouglas Man Bad is a tired meme. The problem is Boeing.

epolanski 3y ago
But the behaviour hasn't changed. Aggressive stock buy backs while losing billions and poor culture are still there.
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  Do 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 ago
    We 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
- nradov 3y ago
  There's no reason to complain about stock buy backs. Most profitable public companies should be returning a portion of those profits to shareholders through stock buy backs.
  - renegade-otter 3y ago
    No they should not. Stock buybacks of such recklessness were not even legal until Reagan - for this exact reason. It's not good business when your stock is growing and your company is dying. In fact, it's just an accounting trick which is essentially vulture capitalism - but from the inside. https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/25/business/bed-bath-beyond-share-repurchases/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/25/business/bed-bath-beyond-shar... "The $11.8 billion Bed Bath & Beyond spent on its own stock since 2004 comes to more than twice the $5.2 billion in debt it had on its books in its most recent SEC filing, a debt load that proved crushing for the company. It left the company unable to buy the inventory required to create the sales it needed to reverse losses. “The company’s stewardship of their capital failed,” said Declan Gargan, retail director and credit analyst who follows Bed Bath & Beyond for S&P Global Ratings."
    - nradov 3y ago
      Nonsense. If the shareholders prefer to take capital out instead of reinvesting in the business there's nothing wrong with that. And if businesses sometimes die as a consequence then so what. Individual businesses have no particular right to exist indefinitely. The only reason that companies use stock buy backs instead of dividends to return capital to shareholders is double taxation. If Congress eliminated the double taxation then there would be little reason for stock buy backs.
      - renegade-otter 3y ago
        Thank you for defining "broken capitalism".
        nradov 3y ago

mschuster91 3y ago

> All the executives and "accountants and MBAs" behind it have long retired. They have, but they have left the cultural infestation behind. You'd need a complete purge of Boeing's leadership, as well as a re-integration of Spirit Aerosystems.

rayiner 3y ago
I don’t think even that would help. Culture is self-replicating. Everyone at Boeing today was hired based on that culture and socialized into it.
Kon-Peki 3y ago
If you did that this afternoon, Boeing would cease to operate. There are no candidates ready and able to step in. They have to be trained, they have to gain experience, etc.

kshacker 3y ago

It is as if I read the grand and the parent comment verbatim yesterday. Deja vu or this is now the pattern for every Boeing discussion?

bena 3y ago
Probably, Boeing was the topic of discussion on Last Week Tonight relatively recently. We're all experts now.

renegade-otter 3y ago

And how long did it take Jack Welch to bleed GE dry? Decades. With companies this size, it doesn't happen overnight. There is a LOT built up before you that you have to systematically destroy.

pyrale 3y ago

> in fact some of Boeing's best and most successful years as a company were well after that. That's logical, isn't it? If your claim is that the company cut the long-term philosophy and squeezed short-term benefits, the most profitable time for the company is logically going to be the time where benefits go up while long-term investments are no longer made. I'm not saying that you're wrong, just that your rebuttal isn't going to convince someone thinking like that.

aaomidi 3y ago

A lot of folks don't realize that MBAification of companies does not have an immediate feedback loop. The entire point is that in the short term it does super well, with the costs being realized in the long term. Boeing's timeline of failure actually matches the trajectory of other MBAified companies.

dangus 3y ago
A lot of people on this forum just use the MBA as a dirty four letter word (minus one letter) without understanding what it is or what it means. There’s no such thing as being “MBAified.” An MBA is a generalist degree that contains the bare minimum information you need to operate a corporation. You know how in undergraduate computer engineering you learn many different subjects like power systems, microcontroller programming, computer programming, transistors, basic processor design, digital/analog circuit design? And how nobody is going to use all those subjects in the real world? That’s exactly what an MBA is like: it’s got subjects like corporate finance, organizational behavior, information systems management, marketing, etc. Just about nobody with an MBA is going to use ever single one of those subjects on a daily basis. Nobody else is being judged by their degree. It’s ridiculous, and kind of disgusting that people act like learning the set of knowledge contained in an MBA makes you a worse manager. Armchair engineers seem to think they could run a multi-billion dollar aircraft manufacturer using avionics engineering skills alone without understanding the concepts you learn in an MBA like inventory turnover, cash flow, global operations, or how to design the organizational structure of a company with tens of thousands of employees. In what way does an engineering degree prepare you to do that job? Imagine if you were a nurse and you got told that you were a worse nurse because you got a nursing degree. That’s what the engineer-types who dunk on MBAs are doing.
- hughesjj 3y ago
  Agreed, I think 'jack welched' or similar would be a better term. Not all MBAs are destructive to institutions. Followers of Jack Welch mostly are.
- elzbardico 3y ago
  Of course nobody is blaming literal MBAs. We are blaming this kind of managerial culture best symbolized by Harvard Business School and MBA programs. The whole idea that no matter what a company does, a generic degree holder, with an education heavily centered on accounting and finance can be the ultimate decision maker without taking into input any other aspect behind financials and accounting. Most business type have this misguided idea that we engineers don't value business and financial knowledge. We do, what we question is the hubris of business people that seem to believe that domain knowledge is not important, and that managing a soft-drink manufacturer is the same as manufacturing a tech company. It is not. The problem with your analogy, is that no nurse are being taught on nursing programs that all that matters is what they learn on their programs. If this happened, yes, nurses would be worse nurses by having those degrees.

rayiner 3y ago

Destroying a successful culture can happen slowly over time, but once it happens, there’s no recovery from it. That’s what seems to have happened with Boeing. The 777 was the last fully pre-merger aircraft. The 787 started right after the merger and mostly seems to have escaped the problems. But since then it’s been a shit show.

idontwantthis 3y ago

I like this idea of geriatric McDonnel Douglas vice presidents being taken out of cryosleep every few months to make a terrible engineering decision then being put back in their cabinet.

elzbardico 3y ago

MBA thinking is exactly about squeezing profits by cutting expenses. You can completely gut a company's future by doing so, while having multiple years of profits guaranteed by backlog orders. There's some kind of inertia, were bad and good decisions take some time to have their effects felt. Likewise, due to the same inertia, unless something dramatic happens, the current administration of a company is downstream the culture of previous administrations, as the people at the helm in the present were promoted, hired mostly based on the criteria of the the last past dramatical cultural change, that was the managerial takeover by the MD bureaucrats post-merge.

whalesalad 3y ago

McDonnell Douglas was when Boeing went to shit.