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Just as a reminder, the former CEO, Dennis Muilenburg, likely responsible for this mess, does have a engineering background: "He received a bachelor's degree i
by lukan 3y ago
Just as a reminder, the former CEO, Dennis Muilenburg, likely responsible for this mess, does have a engineering background:
"He received a bachelor's degree in Aerospace Engineering from Iowa State University, followed by a master's degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics from the University of Washington."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Muilenburg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Muilenburg
So this alone is apparently not enough.
- fleischhauf 3y agoa degree does not help against cheaping out on safety for maximizing profit. Making the head of a company personally responsible might help.
- roenxi 3y agoIt'd help China in their efforts to break in to the sector. You want risk-averse CEOs, increasing the personal risk faced by CEOs will tilt the selection process towards people who are delusional and create incentives for the best people to avoid the job. Fining companies is a much better approach. Companies understand financial signals.
- frodo8sam 3y agoThe long time CEO of ASML, probably one of the most successful engineering companies of the last two decades, is an accountant by training. But if you hear him speak it's all about the quality of the product and delivering value to the customer. The CEO of Boeing should have his priorities right and be willing to listen to his engineers instead of maximizing profits by reducing cost. What he did in college is not that important in my opinion.
- rldjbpin 3y agoit is easy to use qualifications as a crutch for making excuses about leadership when things don't go well. the same happens for tech founders without a management degree acting as ceo.
- anakaine 3y agoThis is also what annoys me about the discourse saying that MBAs ruined the company. As an individual with a science undergrad, engineering postgraduate, and soon to be MBA, any decent MBA program teaches you how to assess things like value proposition, key factors in your offer (eg perception of safety!), with profitability/finance being only one arm of the total educational package you're engaged in. There's a lot of nuance to finding the right leadership as a board.
- nonrandomstring 3y agoI disagree (with some evidence) that these things can be successfully synthesised. I absolutely concede that they are useful. Leadership needs to be aware of the whole spectrum of economics, public perception, brand, international standing etc. And a good leader must know the language so as to hear and instruct his/her subordinates. But subordinate that stuff must stay with respect to hard reality. Evidence is; I taught a bunch of masters business students once. Those who had absorbed too much "financialisation and business" stuff constantly got stuck in what I saw as wishful thinking... that their will alone, or "framing and spinning" could overcome. I found that very dangerous in digital tech. All the more so in something like medicine or aeronautics. I'm fairly serious when I say this stuff can be quite psychologically harmful, because as I read deeper into the management stuff I found it "ideological" and inflexible. Much of it still seems rooted in the 1980s and you can almost still hear Thatcher's voice see the shoulder pads.
- anakaine 3y agoI disagree with this: those who have come through an engineering pathway can be brought up to understand business. Those who have come through business tend to only see engineering as a bunch of propeller hats.
- RandomLensman 3y agoIn most business situations it is not so clear what the "hard reality" is. If you don't push even the experts for change or beyond what they are accustomed to, you tend to get stuck in some very conservative and traditional thinking.
- pbhjpbhj 3y agoSo they need to be anti-capitalist?
- lukan 3y agoIt is about short term profits, vs. long term profits. Dumping quality gets you more money now, but ruins your brand.
- cryptos 3y agoFirst the planes crash, then the company crashes.
- ikt 3y agomaximising profits to the point your company goes broke is generally seen as bad business and thus bad for capitalism im not quite sure where it says in the rules of capitalism to extract all available value out of a good product until it is no longer good
- p_l 3y agoIt says so under "rational actions for capital owner", along with "Friedman Doctrine" in business ethics (often mistaken for an actual law). A company/factory/workers are just a constraint, a limitation, a problem to be worked around, in the capitalist mode of production where the capitalist (owner of capital) tries to increase said capital. If the capitalist can bleed an entity dry, then use the profits to spin up and dry another entity, resulting in higher wealth increase over the same time than setting up stable long-lived company, then it's the rational action to do as owner of capital. When you repackage and dilute ownership enough, you end up with ultimate investor having simple desire of profit from shares they hold in an intermediary, and said intermediary then trying to squeeze those profits out of portfolio of entities. In absence of any other constraint, the rational action is then to increase short-term profit while reducing long-term risk - for example by dropping the involvement before the harvest of sown risks comes by.
- psd1 3y ago
- ju-st 3y agoI remember some posts on HN describing ASML's software quality as atrocious.
- dboreham 3y agoWall St masters of the universe should be required to have an engineering background.
- hkon 3y agoYou have to go back much further, to the late 90's. Because the problems in the industry takes a long time to surface. Muilenburg was a product of the deteriorated culture in Boeing and of course could not do anything but continue along the same path.
- lukan 3y agoBlaming only him would be wrong, sure. "and of course could not do anything but continue along the same path" But I am not so sure about that. You do not have absolute power as a CEO, but you can influence some things. Like hiring people checking for quality. And if they find things (and they would have, if they were competent) then fixing them before crashes would have been waaaay cheaper.
- hkon 3y agoYou do not rise among the ranks for decades, for then suddenly as CEO, reveal your master plan to fix quality issues. And as it happens, it didn't.
- bitcharmer 3y agoHe inherited an already rotten corpse. It was McDonell Douglas MBAs that caused this in their ever lasting search for shareholder value above everything else. These processes take decades. Blaming the last CEO is a bit narrow minded.
- RandomLensman 3y agoHarry Stonecipher has a BS in physics. James McNerney has an MBA. Philip Condit a masters in aeronautical engineering (and a masters in management).
- p_l 3y agoThe trigger was pulled by Boeing lifer who started out as Engineer, and the McDonnel Douglas CEO who followed him was also someone who started out as Engineer. Both of them were instrumental in the divestment, outsourcing, and other strategies that created for example Spirit Aerosystems out of Boeing Wichita.
- nonrandomstring 3y agoPerhaps we're getting this round the wrong way? Instead they should not have an MBA or background in finance, marketing, public relations, or any of those faux "professional" skills that cause perfectly rational STEM thinkers to throw logic and evidence to the crows and start toadying, bamboozling and "compromising". By all means hire and delegate to necessary specialists, accountants, PR people etc. But do not head critical engineering missions with people who've lost focus because they've been corrupted. Otherwise the tail wags the dog.
- colinng 3y agoThe on-his-way-out CEO is David Calhoun. Accountant. https://www.boeing.com/company/bios/david-l-calhoun https://www.boeing.com/company/bios/david-l-calhoun > Calhoun has a bachelor’s degree in accounting from Virginia Tech.