I don't think you need an engineer as CEO for that. Might on the margins help but other things such as ability to change processes or reporting lines might matter more.
If you want cultural change you need a CEO that wants that and knows how to get there - which is not an engineering problem.
Friend, as a software engineer who’s become a CEO I can’t disagree with you more.
The traditional culture of CEOs in the western world isn’t healthy: it’s top down focus and focus on pushing down responsibility and departmental compartmentalization tends to create a lot of the problems the very same management theory fancies itself to solve.
Having an actual “buck stops with me” CEO who has experience in the trenches and not managing other people to get the results that would reassure the market and has been shown to work very well in company after company.
First principles and the culture of questioning need to be nurtured by competent leaders, and not MBA lead presentations and check in meetings for progress. Sleeping in the factory until this situation is fixed is what needs to happen and it is not this board and management team.
Also, this is a board issue first, a CEO issue second.
That is not really related to my point unless you want to say that engineer CEOs are intrinsically better/not susceptible to bad culture etc.
I have worked with great, bad, and middling CEOs and I would not say that it comes down to their degree background where they place in the spectrum of quality. Not having experience in managing other people but only some sort of trench experience will likely fail at a place of the size and complexity.
A lot what you describe is more like poor management.
And, yes, there is a big role for the board to play.
How many have law degrees? The majority of CEOs in the top 100 were not engineers it seems.
And performance is stock performance/TSR, if I understand correctly.
Edit: How is it sea lioning if your link is not establishing what you claim? An intrinsic link between being an engineer and being a high performance CEO would, for example, be that proportionate more engineers than MBAs, etc. are good CEOs.
That just compares MBAs and engineers (not sure what happens if someone has both), not the many other non-engineer educations CEOs can have (law, mathematics, physics, ...). MBA is quite US centric.
> I don't think you need an engineer as CEO for that.
You need a CEO who actually understands the business. If your business is building planes and your CEO has never built a plane, then your business will inevitably have problems because the CEO fundamentally doesn't understand the business.
It won't happen immediately but a slow rot will set in. The CEO won't pay attention to the details because he never understood the details in the first place.
Optus recently had a major network outage. Part of the reason why that happened is they picked a CEO with no telecommunications background. She fundamentally didn't understand the business she was in:
So what exactly would the CEO have to have done to "build planes"? Some wiring? Screwing in things? Ordered parts? Quality tested a component? Why not the need to also piloting a plane to understand how it works? What specific part imbues the required understanding?
To actually have done something and contributed to designing and producing aircraft. To actually have an aeronautical engineering background. That's the business Boeing is in.
Putting inexpert people in positions of authority is guaranteed to damage a business, as Boeing is now finding out.
In most Western countries the most senior person in command is a civilian, not a general or admiral (and there are civilians in various other positions, too).
So when currently in country A something is done by the military and in country B by civilians, only country A has it right?
The US army corps of engineers being in charge of levees isn't the only way, for example. A lot of generals don't fight wars. And those who do, are under civilian supervision.
Civilians control but don't manage the military. They control it, in the sense of setting the goals, but they don't generally manage things after that.
I think that goes to the heart of it: I am not sure generals would necessarily be better at achieving the political objectives of what the military is for.
In the same way, I couldn't say if Boing would need something more closer to a priest or a technocrat.
You need two types of experience: deep and abstract.
You need the deep experience of having worked inside the beaurocracy of a huge effort on some tiny piece of the project.
You need the abstract experience of having built a smaller, less complicated version of an entire plane yourself. Think RC model plane here. And yes you should be at least an RC pilot.
With both of those experiences you will be able to extrapolate very closely everything you need to know to be succesful in establishing an engineering culture.
„Cultural change is not an engineering problem“ - cannot count how often i heared this.
But if you want to have an „engineering culture“ - let an engineer handle it!
But why would anyone whish to hange to said „engineering culture“ if no engineer is around?
Why would it need to be an "engineering culture" as opposed to, for example, a "quality culture"? And even if you want to former, why does it need an engineer to create that culture? Does a good movie director also need to be a good writer or actor?
No it’s the executives role to set the culture and nurture the concerns of quality that are lacking in this organization. And quality is a product engineering attribute and a product of manufacturing concerns being powerful enough within an organization to be addressed, so I was making the suggestion that perhaps an engineer should be in the seat until the problem is remedied.
Lots of other disciplines are irrelevant when you’re talking about actual aircraft manufacturing and not the soft concept of quality.
Edit: aircraft engineering organizations require an executive that understands the airline market and how to build airplanes. This company in particular needs a fixer to address quality problems and reassure the market that substantive changes to the quality of manufacturing will be made.
An expert in toy manufacturing who ran Mattel shouldn’t be overseeing jet aircraft production and this idea that they can do so effectively is a big part of the reason companies continually fall down on manufacturing quality and flame out like GE, HP, and now Boeing are doing. Sorry. This idea that a CEO without a background in aerospace can just fly in and fix everything because of transferrable skills sounds good but it’s just simply not true and in fact is the exact and very specific management theory and corporate ideology that is the root cause of the problems at the core issues this company is experiencing*.
For these type of job hops many fundamental quality principles carry forward, but each is a whole new ball game when you got into it. Also for instance with pharmaceuticals as well as fuels you still use the exact same models of the latest spectrometers and chromatographs, so specialized expertise here carries over ideally but that is just the instrument, not the particular science being conducted.
What it comes down to is that someone with decades of experience in pharma can be useful in the fuel lab and vice versa, but it still takes years to get up to speed before the wisest decisions can be made since either way this type of thing is not soft about quality. That much it shares with aircraft reliability.
It takes a certain type of leadership to prevail in a situation like Boeing (and many others) did during World War II, and this has been so sorely lost by now that there is very little remaining linkage back to the real thing.
And while I'm here don't ask me how I know the airline companies' fuel is tested as reliably as their fuselages, and by a bureau with management hierarchy having a degree of dedication that's noticeably more modern than what was once expected in the past.
I don't think the pedigree matters as much as for the leadership of a company to really know their product and market. I don't think that ex Boeing engineer turned ex Boeing CEO really knew their product given how absurd the procedures sounded to pilots around mcas and now with this de-icing issue.
what did ballmer do at microsoft before he was CEO? What did microsoft look like after he became CEO?
Same questions, but with Satya. There's a reason Apple strongly prefers to hire from within. Actually, you could ask the same questions about jobs and cook.
You need to live and breathe the company. Further, the executive's background WILL play a role in the company's direction.
Not who you’re responding to, but I agree with the notion that if you want an engineering culture, you need an engineer at the top.
Engineering is one of the few fields that understands value. Most other functions, within a corporation, are more process oriented and have a more transactional world view as a consequence of dealing with costs for most of their activities.
In other words, if you want to slash budgets, lay off staff, and deliver value to shareholders, your faithful MBA is your go to. If you want to build cultures that create products that strive to satisfy arrays of non-functional requires, like efficiency, reliability, and safety, engineering managers have spent their careers building these departments.
I assume it’s easier to find an engineer who went to engineering school to learn how to build airplanes that are safe than it is to find an MBA who went to business school to learn how to build planes that are safe. (It’s not about the knowledge but about the root desire)
Similarly, I assume it’s harder to find an engineer who went into the field purely for money.
I do think on average engineers will prioritize safety (since they likely understand failure modes and production and long tail statistics better. We literally have to take engineering ethics classes), at the cost of doing a worse job at running the business. But when the business requires this level of safety, that IS doing a good job.
You need to be able to steer a large and complex organisation - being an engineer has nothing to do with that. And, yes, incentives matter, but those can be set.
No. This just says some engineers can (like some MBAs). There is no intrinsic link between being an engineer and being a great CEO. Most engineers are not executives.
This argument relies on false equivalence and isn’t even rational.
Except top executives are engineering degree holders. They are, and that’s a fact. The majority of top performing companies are headed by engineering degree holding CEOs.
But you keep making the same wrong points and trying to play devils advocate on positions that you don’t back up.
If you want to claim an intrinsic link between being an engineer and being a top performing CEO, you need to show something different anyway. For example, that the proportion of engineers that are great CEOs is higher than the proportion of MBAs or lawyers or chemist or ... that are great CEOs. Maybe that is true, but I haven't seen it.
Edit: we could also look at a narrower problem, for example: is the performance of engineer CEOs in "engineering companies" better on average than that of non-engineer CEOs in that sector?
I am not saying engineers cannot be good CEOs, just that the link between being an engineer and a good CEO is (probably) not intrinsic.
"If you have a great executive ticking all the boxes - splendid.
But there is no intrinsic link between being an engineer and being a good CEO (same holds for other disciplines, btw.). You could have engineers that qualify, lawyers, MBAs, mathematicians, physicists, ...
Who do you want, a good director, a good actor, or a director who's a good director and a good actor? Which do you want, a quality culture, an engineering culture, or a quality and engineering culture? Of course one is "in charge" but pretty clearly "engineering" and "quality" aren't even in the room....
Let me put it this way: someone who is a great engineer but has no skill in running and steering a large organisation will fail. Someone who knows how to do the latter might succeed by "using" talented engineers within the organisation.
Or someone who is an engineer with experience running large organizations? Why engineer means automatically no experiencing running large organizations in your mind is baffling.
If you have a great executive ticking all the boxes - splendid.
But there is no intrinsic link between being an engineer and being a good CEO (same holds for other disciplines, btw.). You could have engineers that qualify, lawyers, MBAs, mathematicians, physicists, ...
Citation, please. And, no, having a plurality of top performing CEOs being engineers is not showing an intrinsic link between being an engineer and top performing CEO.
Find your own citations. You have received a reply of substance to your multitude of questions and requests for evidence many times. This is the reason I said you were sea lioning.
> Sealioning is a type of trolling or harassment that consists of pursuing people with relentless requests for evidence, often tangential or previously addressed, while maintaining a pretense of civility and sincerity, and feigning ignorance of the subject matter.
This is what you keep doing and it’s rather exhausting.
You want engineering quality experts, but not clear at all that needs to be at CEO level. If you have someone with that skill and great experience running large and complex organisations - great take them. If not, take someone who knows how to get organisations to change and do stuff.
There is plenty of evidence that engineers in the CEO seat are effective drivers of companies and shareholder value. This is false equivalence reasoning presented over and over in this thread and I dare say this opinion is quite antiquated and precisely the thinking that has put Boeing on its current destructive course.
Not really. My arguments have been pretty consistent that being an engineer and being a good CEO are not really linked. Some engineers are good CEO, so are some MBAs, physcians, ...
Not clear at all that the best CEO is an MBA either. Putting an MBA in charge of engineering processes is like arguing anyone can do it, so if that's the position then why the resistance towards it being an engineer? If you want a culture expert, how about a history prof or an anthropologist? "Experience running large organizations" usually just equates to failing upwards.. run the last few orgs you admin into the ground and hide the debris with outsourcing, mergers, acquisitions, anything that hides your responsibility long enough to dodge accountability, move on to the next before it gets pinned on you. Do that 10 or 15 times, and that's a great career for most of the leadership/culture "experts" in the CEO world. I don't get the apologism or tendency to lionize these people
Quality is an engineering attribute: a byproduct of a culture that by definition survives in a company despite profit drive by putting minimum standards and support for people who keep them before or in balance with the bottom line concerns. Quality isn’t a culture, it’s literally a product engineering concerns that get prioritized.
The old school management theory is that engineering leaders are accountable to shipping quality products on time and within budget. That’s it.
But a CEO's historical understanding of engineering operations has been pretty opaque: ships on time, or doesn't. Of course this is lacking everything meaningful about software.
So the same visionary management theory has come up with a concept of DORA metrics. This provides the competency with quality management metrics that allow for decision-making around whether engineering is delivering or not and a whole new level of understanding and abstraction.
But understand that most of the companies that are getting themselves in deep shit right now are doing so because they have removed power from their engineering organizations to the point where, and the service of relentless extraction of shareholder value, they have destroyed their companies and crippled their products. It is happened to quite a few companies and manufacturers in the United States, from GE to Boeing, and from IBM to GM.
The current profit comes from revenue not reputation culture thinks that you can build some level of abstraction to engineering management, and then layer on traditional management theory in order to extract value from a chain of command.
The truth is that engineering lead organizations deliver a great deal, more value to shareholders in the long-term, as they are more focused on building the platforms that create competitive long-term foundations. Companies like Netflix, Google, Apple, and other “tech companies” occupy the top value of the stock market in equities positions around the world, because of the fact that they are able to use software to amplify the value of their innovations at profound levels. But America’s Legacy companies continue to operate as if this lesson is not true they continue to prioritize optimization over platform.
The old system continues to persist with the idea that there must be a professional manager at the top of the organization, rather than someone who is focused on creating value with platforms, and the culture tends to produce these situations of crisis in exploitation, because they do not understand how important it is to create a culture of platform value creation.
So of course, I make the comment that we should have an “engineering experience CEO,” or even an actual engineer in the CEO seat, and predictably it ends up being criticized for the fact that we could have a professional manager in that seat, and don’t actually need an engineer to be a CEO. That’s fine, and I can understand the point you’re raising.
But, it’s been my experience that CEOs that have been in involved in platform, engineering and large scale systems management do a much better job of preserving the culture that creates lasting and durable platform value for companies like Boeing, and this is the value which has been destroyed and the culture which must be resurrected before the company crashes.
So, rather than bringing another abstraction specialist, who will find another metric values system to manage things, which isn’t working, I was suggesting that we should bring in an actual engineer to sleep on the factory floor and make sure that this culture stops before someone dies and the share price drops to unrecoverable levels (where it’s going!).
To expound I’ll say this.
The current culture at Boeing is very much a culture where the engineers don’t speak up. Many of the most passionate people who worked there have been fired or let go because they spoke up so, I think it’s time for a change before one of the most storied and important companies in American history becomes yet another casualty of the MBA-lead, value extracting management theory.
So in sun, it really doesn’t matter if the CEO is an engineer, but it matters that the CEO is not working with abstractions, and therefore I was making the suggestion that the CEO should be an engineer, or at least come from engineering as a background, so that we do not continue the pattern of incompetent management that has gotten this company to the brink of failure.
Forgive my typos, I had to dictate this as I’m traveling.
If you want cultural change you need a CEO that wants that and knows how to get there - which is not an engineering problem.