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To add to this & the Jobs interview - an oil industry proverb: a healthy oil company has a geologist in charge, a mature one has an engineer in charge, a declin

• SirHumphrey 1y ago
  A bit ironic though because the CEO of Boing during their best years was William McPherson Allen, a lawyer.
  • sitharus 1y ago
    He initially turned down the job because he felt that a lawyer wasn't the right person to run an engineering company, and from reports of people who worked with him he knew his knowledge limits and listened to the engineers. He took serious risks with the 707 and 747 projects because he trusted the people who understood the technology. MBAs and final-gasp lawyers concentrate on making the reported number go up in the short term, they won't take a hit now for a payoff in ten years.
    • grepfru_it 1y ago
      Fun fact the 707 had the first implementation of “MCAS” because the plane had a tendency to pitch up in a certain flaps configuration. They added a stick nudger which applied light pressure in said config. Not a stick pusher, as it did not alert the pilots, it simply applied an extra input independent of the pilots. However this was made aware to all pilots of the plane and likely contributed to its certification. Also the 707 tail was extended by 40ft to give it better minimum ground speed control, this was retroactively applied to already built planes. Very interesting to see how this was applied in the past with a lawyer at the helm vs the current ceo during the launch of the 737Max
      • quacksilver 1y ago
        Assume 40 inches rather than 40ft Adding 12 meters to an aircraft is quite a big change.
        • grepfru_it 1y ago
          Mistake on my part they extended the tail to 40ft from 32ft
      • exidy 1y ago
        I think there might be some confusion here. The vertical stabiliser (not the tail) was extended by 40 inches [0] to combat concerns about poor yaw control. Although the Wikipedia article cites the UK ARB as the influence, it was also in response to the 1959 crash [1] of a 707 being used for training, in which Dutch roll was induced and later became so violent it ripped 3 engines off the wings. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_707#707-420 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_707#707-420 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1959_Washington_Boeing_707_crash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1959_Washington_Boeing_707_cra...
    • izacus 1y ago
      Hmm, you now highlighted an interesting thing - every company (I've seen) being run to the ground by MBAs and Lawyers was done so because they outright refused to trust their employees. The usual playbook is severance of any transparency and communication and implementation of more and more paperwork and oversight over their employees with no nuance. In other words - complete lack of trust into employed specialists being able to do their work.
      • sitharus 1y ago
        yep, that's the most important thing about his operation of Boeing. Both the 707 and 747 were "bet the company" projects, in particular the 747 pushed Boeing to the brink of bankruptcy. However both were major successes because they took a gamble on the future of the aviation industry. In these days of "fiduciary responsibility" it's difficult to imagine any public company taking that kind of risk. Risk is what should make returns.
  • bluGill 1y ago
    There are always people who work out despite common sense saying they shouldn't that doesn't mean common sense is wrong, it just means we don't understand what the real factors are.
    • potato3732842 1y ago
      Or we don't care because it's a rule of thumb not a law of physics.
  • flkiwi 1y ago
    One of the most exceptional CEOs I've worked with was a lawyer. I still think the proverb is largely correct, along with the other proverb about the exception proving the rule.
    • parineum 1y ago
      That's not what "the exception proves the rule" means. It means, when you see a sign that says an exception, "no parking Wednesdays between 8 and 12", it proves the rule that parking is allowed otherwise.
      • embwbam 1y ago
        I have heard that phrase a million times and never understood it until your example. Thank you
      • cgio 1y ago
        A phrase does not mean anything by itself. People mean something when they use it. You could argue that expressions carry some meaning, by virtue of shared use. But your definition does not align with the meaning most people make of this specific expression as you can witness above.
        • parineum 1y ago
          The way most people use it is wrong though and not in the normal "language evolves" way. The exception of a lawyer being a good CEO does not, in any way, prove that lawyers are not good CEOs .
          • tsimionescu 1y ago
            The phrase "most people mean the wrong thing by this phrase" makes no sense. A phrase means what most people mean by saying it, or understand by hearing it. So, "the exception that proves the rule" is, as its main modern meaning, a joking way of admitting that a rule (especially one that the speaker had argued for) is not actually a universal rule, while maintaining that it generally holds true. The examples of legal signs and so on are a more specific, technical, meaning that is only used in certain contexts, such as actual legal proceedings or at least informal discussions about laws or contract terms. When /u/flkiwi above said this phrase, they obviously meant it in the joking sense I gave, and which they had actually explained above. They agree that, in general, lawyers make bad CEOs, but they also personally know of exceptions. This is not "wrong usage", as proven by the fact that everyone who read the comment understood exactly what they meant. This whole thing reminds me of the people who complain about the use of literally as an amplifier instead of for its primary meaning as "wrong", with seemingly no understanding of how flourishes and rhetoric work (nor even of the history of words like "very", which used to be quite similar to "literally" a long time ago).
  • taneq 1y ago
    I’d wager he wasn’t just a lawyer.
    • dennis_jeeves2 1y ago
      Exactly, mostly likely he would have made a great engineer if that were his line of expertise.
  • dennis_jeeves2 1y ago
    He was talking about stereotypes ... And yes professions have stereotypical personalities. Like the used car salesman.
  • ExoticPearTree 1y ago
    > A bit ironic though because the CEO of Boing during their best years was William McPherson Allen, a lawyer. Just as there are good engineers, there are also bad ones. Same for every profession. I guess the question is: can Boeing really design a new plane where cost cutting, regulation interpretation and skirting, and greed are _not_ the driving factors? It feels like what Boeing is saving from all the nickel-and-dime it does on everything it ends up paying lawyers, fines and damages. I wonder how they manage to see this as good business. Or maybe they hope that "the next" time they'll score big without any penalties?
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• pavlov 1y ago
  Nokia’s CEO between 2006 and 2010 was their former chief lawyer. It’s like they knew they were dying even before Apple delivered the actual blow.
  • davidkwast 1y ago
    Nokia is the best case study of what not to do. In 2005 Nokia launched the 770 Internet Tablet. It was the groundwork for the modern smartphone. But the management did not allow it to have a GSM modem. So it was not a smartphone. Only after the iPhone Nokia launched the N900 but it was too late. Nokia did not believe in touch screen too.
    • zdw 1y ago
      The 770 and Maemo environment were pretty amazing back in the day - high resolution screen for the time, but a somewhat laggy interface given the compute available at the time. Hardware was somewhat compromised - the half-height MMC storage expansion was particularly difficult to find. I still have one sitting around somewhere. It did support touch, with a stylus built in - I forget if the stylus was needed or if you could use your bare fingers.
      • davidkwast 1y ago
        True. But Nokia could do many improvements before Apple launched iPhone. But Nokia decided to stay only with Symbian without touch. And we had to wait 4 years to Android show what a Linux with Java smartphone would be. And we saw Nokia going down with Microsoft. It was interesting times back then.
        • tim-- 1y ago
          Interesting times indeed. It was also just before the Nokia acquisition that Microsoft was selling their first Android phone (under the Nokia brand) so they could see the winds of change. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_X Nokia already had Android phones released months before the Microsoft acquisition closed. Makes me wonder if Nokia would have pulled out completely from making Windows phones had Microsoft not purchased them. Even Microsoft changed their tune, releasing Android phones themselves years later under the Surface brand.
• wnc3141 1y ago
  In most cases,the successor to a founder CEO is a finance person - because their mandate is to massage the stock on the behalf of the appointing board.
• buildsjets 1y ago
  Dennis Muilenberg has a BS in Aerospace Engineering and a MS in Aeronautics and Astronautics. He was Boeing’s CEO during and after the MAX disaster. He cannot be blamed for the first crash, but he absolutely bears a direct responsibility for every person who died in the second crash, as by that point he knew that he had delivered a product that had not been correctly and fully certified by the regulatory authority. An ethical person with that knowledge, whether they be an engineer, lawyer, or a circus clown, would have fought tooth and nail to ensure the aircraft was grounded. I am much more interested in the ethics of any particular leader, than their credentials.
  • goku12 1y ago
    The mistake was committed willfully well before the first crash. Their emails during the development and testing of the Max 8 show some strongly worded exchanges clearly indicating their full awareness of the troubles with the MCAS system. There was one simulated flight by a test pilot where the MCAS had activated and was deemed a catastrophic failure. In another instance, the chief test pilot said, "I basically lied to the regulators, unknowingly" - a mistake that he chose not to rectify. It was abundantly clear at that point that business as usual was going to cost lives. The entire top management knew this and yet, not one of them decided to step in. The first crash was already too late for them. A team that behaved so callously earlier wasn't going to stop at that point without an external intervention. They were in fact attempting to scapegoat the pilots even after the second crash. Therefore, putting the blame on one CEO at the time of the first crash is illogical. The blame must fall on the team that established such an unbelievably flawed safety culture in the first place. Who was that? And why? I'm not insisting that accountants and lawyers are unfit for top management. There are corporate portfolios that they're the best fit for - like accounting and law firms. Then there are the exceptions who do a sensible job even outside their portfolio. But I have seen both engineering heavy and accounting heavy managements. As expected, their priorities and operational philosophies are drastically different. But their influence doesn't end there. They also define the wider company culture - A culture that not even a CEO can change without significant personal effort against institutional inertia. So, accountants or lawyers may be sufficient to lead IT companies. But if they choose to lead an industry where so many lives are at stake, they better hold back their profit-seeking instincts and understand the safety culture and the consequences of their decisions damn well.
• black_13 1y ago
  [dead]
• gamblor956 1y ago
  declining one has an accountant in charge, and a dying one has a lawyer in charge. You would think by now that HN would understand that there is a difference between the accountants and the finance guys. The greatest con that Finance achieved is convincing everyone that the accountants were to blame for everything finance did. But the accountants just handle the transactional details. They don't make the financial decisions. And generally a dying company should have a lawyer in charge because their mandate is to try to negotiate selling off the company or its assets, or to run it through bankruptcy.