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I've started to bring up Admiral Rickover's speech Doing a Job in all of the Boeing threads because he is just so relevant. Admiral Rickover was the man respons

I've started to bring up Admiral Rickover's speech Doing a Job in all of the Boeing threads because he is just so relevant. Admiral Rickover was the man responsible for America having nuclear submarines. https://govleaders.org/rickover.htm https://govleaders.org/rickover.htm The speech is well worth a read in its entirety and it feels prescient in regards to Boeing. I think this paragraph more than any other hits at the core problem at Boeing: > Unless the individual truly responsible can be identified when something goes wrong, no one has really been responsible. With the advent of modern management theories it is becoming common for organizations to deal with problems in a collective manner, by dividing programs into subprograms, with no one left responsible for the entire effort. There is also the tendency to establish more and more levels of management, on the theory that this gives better control. These are but different forms of shared responsibility, which easily lead to no one being responsible—a problems that often inheres in large corporations as well as in the Defense Department. To contrast here is a statement from Calhoun: “We caused the problem. And we understand that. Over these last few weeks, I've had tough conversations with our customers, with our regulators, congressional leaders, and more. We understand why they are angry, and we will work to earn their confidence,” Calhoun said. That we is him failing to take personal responsibility and choosing instead to spread responsibility to all employees, making no one responsible for the state of Boeing. Boeing needs a leader who will take personal responsibility.

qznc 3y ago
> When I came to Washington before World War II to head the electrical section of the Bureau of Ships, I found that one man was in charge of design, another of production, a third handled maintenance, while a fourth dealt with fiscal matters. The entire bureau operated that way. It didn’t make sense to me. Design problems showed up in production, production errors showed up in maintenance, and financial matters reached into all areas. I changed the system. I made one man responsible for his entire area of equipment—for design, production, maintenance, and contracting. If anything went wrong, I knew exactly at whom to point. I run my present organization on the same principle. Rickover was apparently a fan of simple hierarchies. In contrast, Andy Grove like matrix organisation. From "High Output Management": > It's not because Intel loved ambiguity that we became a hybrid organization. We have tried everything else, and while other models may have been less ambiguous, they simply didn't work. Hybrid organizations and the accompanying dual reporting principle, like a democracy, are not great in and of themselves. They just happen to be the best way for any business to be organized.
TheHiddenSun 3y ago
I guess that's why Elon Musk is so successful? He does not shy away from taking responsibility (and loudly boasting about it / taking credit on Twitter/x).
yuppiepuppie 3y ago
Thank you for sharing this. I have been feeling cynical about the "blameless" culture seeping into entire organizations recently. At the end of some quarters where my team has fallen behind, I run away from the question of "who was really at fault here?". I probably should not do that...
- notabee 3y ago
  Perhaps you haven't worked enough in a habitually blaming organization. The problem is that blaming is both easy and often spurious. So in the end you still often run into the same problem: a bunch of people pointing fingers at each other and no one owning anything. If anyone takes a fall because of it that's often more a measure of their political power rather than their actual culpability. It also fails to address dysfunctional organizational processes that make individual errors more likely, because everyone is more concerned with finding a single scapegoat or small group of them. Maybe we need a new way of expressing "blameless" that still expresses that personal responsibilty for quality work should be expected, but that punitive blame politics are simply a very ineffective way of encouraging that or finding the truth when problems inevitably occur.
- throwaway290 3y ago
  The blameless culture is about the benefits of not blaming the reports I think. If you manage a team you should see yourself at fault in a sense if something goes wrong just by implication. But you should try not to make it a big deal for respective team member and your higher-ups should try the same for you... Making it clear who did it does not mean firing that person or making them feel like shit internally, it's a learning process, but the higher up you go the more you should feel bad (presumably you went through the learning process and earning big bucks as a result, so wtf)
  - yuppiepuppie 3y ago
    > The blameless culture is about the benefits of not blaming the reports I think. That may have been the case, but their are entire company values that insist on the blameless culture. This certainly sends a message organization wide to all levels that blame is not tolerated.
se4u 3y ago
I feel this, I also still dont understand RACI , like how can responsibility and accountability be truly separate? It just seems wrong
- bitnovus 3y ago
  From what I’ve seen, one person must be accountable, but the accountable person can delegate to others for joint responsibility.
- FredPret 3y ago
  RACI is the kind of powerpoint-ready horseshit invented by the worst kind of consultant.
  - raverbashing 3y ago
    Actually I see this in another way RACI yes, it is exactly such a powerpoint-ready bleeding obvious crap so that crayon eating MBAs can figure out who to involve for each task
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  Responsible means you get the blame. Accountability means you get the credit.
- kqr 3y ago
  From a cursory glance, it seems like RACI is confused, not you. Any description I find on RACI seems to conflate accountability with responsibility and it looks like a mess. Accountability means something enirely different to responsibility. Being accountable means being able to explain the reasoning behind a decision to a jury of peers -- literally being able to account for the considerations that went into the decision. A person is accountable with no responsibility if they expect to have to be able to explain their decision, but they don't have to take personal blame or credit for it. A person is responsible but not accountable if they take personal blame or credit, but nobody is given the right to question their judgment and ask for details around it. Accountability is a somewhat bureaucratic idea. We want good reasoning, but in the name of efficiency we don't want people to explain their reasoning when they communicate decisions. We also don't want to give people responsibility, and without responsibility we don't trust them to reason well on their own accord, so we reserve the right to grill them about their reasoning after the fact if the outcome turns out bad. (In fully formed bureaucracies this accounting must be recorded in a long report to be filed away for nobody ever to read.)
MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
> With the advent of modern management theories it is becoming common for organizations to deal with problems in a collective manner, by dividing programs into subprograms, with no one left responsible for the entire effort. This is the tendency of all bureaucracies, everywhere, always. At least companies can be outcompeted - not so easy with governments.
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  Unless we had more competitive elections. Would be nice to see the Democrats and Republicans get busted for antitrust.
  - lettergram 3y ago
    Ah yes, which administration would bring the case? lol which judge review the case? I somewhat agree, but the way the current antitrust configuration is in the US, the DOJ or perhaps a state attorney can bring the case. All of them are elected and part of one of those parties.
robertlagrant 3y ago
The only thing that worries me about that link is the disclaimer.
weinzierl 3y ago
It actually has become worse than that in many cases. Instead of being distributed to the collective "we", responsibility is often pushed down to the lower ranks in a systematic way. A good example for this is Dieselgate, where management asked for "creativity" from James Liang and other engineers, knowing very well that they were driving their employees into muddy water without getting dirty themselves.
mikpanko 3y ago
Unfortunately, the type of people who take personal responsibility for failures in organizations don’t end up climbing corporate ladders high enough to be considered for CEO positions. That’s just how large human groups work where contributions of each individual cannot be directly observed by everybody. Storytelling and making oneself look better start playing bigger role for promotions than actual results. Jeffrey Pfeffer writes in depth about it in his books about power.
PaulHoule 3y ago
There’s also the question of where the rot really started. I’d say that it goes back fairly far to the early 2000s or so when they should have had a development cadence like “widebody, narrowbody, widebody, narrowbody” because narrowbody is 80% of the market but instead it has been “widebody, widebody, widebody, widebody, yet another widebody”. Airbus and Boeing colluded to compete with one hand behind their backs in this time period which was profitable in the short term but would kill Boeing in the long term if it were not “too essential to national defense to fail” —- that is, with fly-by-wire and better geometry the A320 has more of a future (can even steal some of the widebody business) not the mention Airbus bought the A220 which is a next-generation narrowbody which was developed not by a big manufacturer but a small manufacturer backed by the Canadian government. Try getting a flight in a modern narrowbody like the E2-Jet or A220 on an airline like Breeze and you will se that nobody would put up with riding in a 737 if they had a choice; even though that kind of plane is small on the outside it feels big on the outside, comfort is much more like a huge plane. It’s one of those things you have to fly to believe.
- decafninja 3y ago
  I recently flew an A220 (Korean Air). When I saw that the plane for the flight was an A220, I was curious what the buzz was over this plane. It was…alright. It also felt very cramped. Seating was 2-3 across. People had noticeable trouble walking down the aisle. Opening the overhead bins seemed dangerous as it could easily bang someone’s head. I last took a 737 (unsure of variant, but wasn’t a Max) in 2022, but I don’t remember it being as cramped as the A220.
  - sandmn 3y ago
    I flew it couple of times. For me it's nicer because of 2-3 seating - smaller % of middle seats and if you're flying with someone you can take 2 seats next to each other. Also economy seats are slightly wider (0.5-1 inch) which is not much but still appreciated. They are definitely felt much nicer and quieter than smaller planes like Embraer E175 or E195.
  - dagw 3y ago
    It was…alright. It also felt very cramped. The 'buzz' about the A220 is that you can fly more people further while using less fuel. All of this is super exciting if you are an airline, but nothing that directly benefits you as a passenger. There are various configurations of the A220, but the most 'efficient' ones are very cramped.

qznc 3y ago

> When I came to Washington before World War II to head the electrical section of the Bureau of Ships, I found that one man was in charge of design, another of production, a third handled maintenance, while a fourth dealt with fiscal matters. The entire bureau operated that way. It didn’t make sense to me. Design problems showed up in production, production errors showed up in maintenance, and financial matters reached into all areas. I changed the system. I made one man responsible for his entire area of equipment—for design, production, maintenance, and contracting. If anything went wrong, I knew exactly at whom to point. I run my present organization on the same principle. Rickover was apparently a fan of simple hierarchies. In contrast, Andy Grove like matrix organisation. From "High Output Management": > It's not because Intel loved ambiguity that we became a hybrid organization. We have tried everything else, and while other models may have been less ambiguous, they simply didn't work. Hybrid organizations and the accompanying dual reporting principle, like a democracy, are not great in and of themselves. They just happen to be the best way for any business to be organized.

TheHiddenSun 3y ago

I guess that's why Elon Musk is so successful? He does not shy away from taking responsibility (and loudly boasting about it / taking credit on Twitter/x).

yuppiepuppie 3y ago

Thank you for sharing this. I have been feeling cynical about the "blameless" culture seeping into entire organizations recently. At the end of some quarters where my team has fallen behind, I run away from the question of "who was really at fault here?". I probably should not do that...

notabee 3y ago
Perhaps you haven't worked enough in a habitually blaming organization. The problem is that blaming is both easy and often spurious. So in the end you still often run into the same problem: a bunch of people pointing fingers at each other and no one owning anything. If anyone takes a fall because of it that's often more a measure of their political power rather than their actual culpability. It also fails to address dysfunctional organizational processes that make individual errors more likely, because everyone is more concerned with finding a single scapegoat or small group of them. Maybe we need a new way of expressing "blameless" that still expresses that personal responsibilty for quality work should be expected, but that punitive blame politics are simply a very ineffective way of encouraging that or finding the truth when problems inevitably occur.
throwaway290 3y ago
The blameless culture is about the benefits of not blaming the reports I think. If you manage a team you should see yourself at fault in a sense if something goes wrong just by implication. But you should try not to make it a big deal for respective team member and your higher-ups should try the same for you... Making it clear who did it does not mean firing that person or making them feel like shit internally, it's a learning process, but the higher up you go the more you should feel bad (presumably you went through the learning process and earning big bucks as a result, so wtf)
- yuppiepuppie 3y ago
  > The blameless culture is about the benefits of not blaming the reports I think. That may have been the case, but their are entire company values that insist on the blameless culture. This certainly sends a message organization wide to all levels that blame is not tolerated.

se4u 3y ago

I feel this, I also still dont understand RACI , like how can responsibility and accountability be truly separate? It just seems wrong

bitnovus 3y ago
From what I’ve seen, one person must be accountable, but the accountable person can delegate to others for joint responsibility.
FredPret 3y ago
RACI is the kind of powerpoint-ready horseshit invented by the worst kind of consultant.
- raverbashing 3y ago
  Actually I see this in another way RACI yes, it is exactly such a powerpoint-ready bleeding obvious crap so that crayon eating MBAs can figure out who to involve for each task
robertlagrant 3y ago
Responsible means you get the blame. Accountability means you get the credit.
kqr 3y ago
From a cursory glance, it seems like RACI is confused, not you. Any description I find on RACI seems to conflate accountability with responsibility and it looks like a mess. Accountability means something enirely different to responsibility. Being accountable means being able to explain the reasoning behind a decision to a jury of peers -- literally being able to account for the considerations that went into the decision. A person is accountable with no responsibility if they expect to have to be able to explain their decision, but they don't have to take personal blame or credit for it. A person is responsible but not accountable if they take personal blame or credit, but nobody is given the right to question their judgment and ask for details around it. Accountability is a somewhat bureaucratic idea. We want good reasoning, but in the name of efficiency we don't want people to explain their reasoning when they communicate decisions. We also don't want to give people responsibility, and without responsibility we don't trust them to reason well on their own accord, so we reserve the right to grill them about their reasoning after the fact if the outcome turns out bad. (In fully formed bureaucracies this accounting must be recorded in a long report to be filed away for nobody ever to read.)

MrBuddyCasino 3y ago

> With the advent of modern management theories it is becoming common for organizations to deal with problems in a collective manner, by dividing programs into subprograms, with no one left responsible for the entire effort. This is the tendency of all bureaucracies, everywhere, always. At least companies can be outcompeted - not so easy with governments.

PaulHoule 3y ago
Unless we had more competitive elections. Would be nice to see the Democrats and Republicans get busted for antitrust.
- lettergram 3y ago
  Ah yes, which administration would bring the case? lol which judge review the case? I somewhat agree, but the way the current antitrust configuration is in the US, the DOJ or perhaps a state attorney can bring the case. All of them are elected and part of one of those parties.

robertlagrant 3y ago

The only thing that worries me about that link is the disclaimer.

weinzierl 3y ago

It actually has become worse than that in many cases. Instead of being distributed to the collective "we", responsibility is often pushed down to the lower ranks in a systematic way. A good example for this is Dieselgate, where management asked for "creativity" from James Liang and other engineers, knowing very well that they were driving their employees into muddy water without getting dirty themselves.

mikpanko 3y ago

Unfortunately, the type of people who take personal responsibility for failures in organizations don’t end up climbing corporate ladders high enough to be considered for CEO positions. That’s just how large human groups work where contributions of each individual cannot be directly observed by everybody. Storytelling and making oneself look better start playing bigger role for promotions than actual results. Jeffrey Pfeffer writes in depth about it in his books about power.

PaulHoule 3y ago

There’s also the question of where the rot really started. I’d say that it goes back fairly far to the early 2000s or so when they should have had a development cadence like “widebody, narrowbody, widebody, narrowbody” because narrowbody is 80% of the market but instead it has been “widebody, widebody, widebody, widebody, yet another widebody”. Airbus and Boeing colluded to compete with one hand behind their backs in this time period which was profitable in the short term but would kill Boeing in the long term if it were not “too essential to national defense to fail” —- that is, with fly-by-wire and better geometry the A320 has more of a future (can even steal some of the widebody business) not the mention Airbus bought the A220 which is a next-generation narrowbody which was developed not by a big manufacturer but a small manufacturer backed by the Canadian government. Try getting a flight in a modern narrowbody like the E2-Jet or A220 on an airline like Breeze and you will se that nobody would put up with riding in a 737 if they had a choice; even though that kind of plane is small on the outside it feels big on the outside, comfort is much more like a huge plane. It’s one of those things you have to fly to believe.

decafninja 3y ago
I recently flew an A220 (Korean Air). When I saw that the plane for the flight was an A220, I was curious what the buzz was over this plane. It was…alright. It also felt very cramped. Seating was 2-3 across. People had noticeable trouble walking down the aisle. Opening the overhead bins seemed dangerous as it could easily bang someone’s head. I last took a 737 (unsure of variant, but wasn’t a Max) in 2022, but I don’t remember it being as cramped as the A220.
- sandmn 3y ago
  I flew it couple of times. For me it's nicer because of 2-3 seating - smaller % of middle seats and if you're flying with someone you can take 2 seats next to each other. Also economy seats are slightly wider (0.5-1 inch) which is not much but still appreciated. They are definitely felt much nicer and quieter than smaller planes like Embraer E175 or E195.
- dagw 3y ago
  It was…alright. It also felt very cramped. The 'buzz' about the A220 is that you can fly more people further while using less fuel. All of this is super exciting if you are an airline, but nothing that directly benefits you as a passenger. There are various configurations of the A220, but the most 'efficient' ones are very cramped.