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
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.
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.
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...
The blameless postmortem comes from air crash investigation, where it works extremely well.
If people know there is a risk of blame, it changes their behavior. It creates incentives to destroy evidence, or avoid creating it in the first place. It creates incentives to stay inside your organizational and political boundaries rather than reach out to solve problems. Whereas if you have a successful blameless culture it is much easier to find out what actually happened.
The first of those is the aviation safety reporting system, which provides explicitly for immunity from sanction for inadvertent violations of FAA regulations (with certain limitations).
The second of those is basically the first aviation law clause for flight crews (after 91.1 which is the "this is what this section of law applies to" and 91.2 which doesn't exist) and gives broad discretion to deviate from any rule [in this part of federal law] as needed to address an emergency.
ASRS is directly and strongly supportive of the overall blameless culture in aviation. 91.3 is moderately supportive of it.
To me, "blameless organisation" is about raising the bar for blaming people. It makes you try _really hard_ to blame the process that allowed this to happen: if you really can't... _Then_ we're within the realm of professional negligence/misconduct or performance
Blameless culture doesn't mean "we seek to not understand who was involved or played a part in the bad outcome", but rather "we seek to not punish them for their involvement, while seeking to understand who, what, why, when, and how in order that we can design a more robust overall system".
Blame-oriented cultures result in people hiding problems, which makes them worse in the long run.
That doesn’t mean people aren’t accountable for their actions in “blameless” cultures, but problems are first assumed to be the result of systemic issues, deserving to be fixed, rather than individual issues, deserving to be punished.
The first one would refresh all the cached information after a marketing database update. The second would stop all the webservers.
Guy's first day; I'm showing him the ropes; we push the marketing data update and set about regenerating all the cache files by manually picking the correct file from the folder of all possible files. I'm sure we can all guess what happened to make this a story remotely worth telling...
Complete site outage. Completely unnecessary. Completely human error.
Should we blame the guy who clicked on the file that was directly adjacent to the one he intended? Should we blame me as the guy overseeing the training? Or should we change the system so that files that we use multiple times everyday and are safe/innocuous are't right next to an E-stop/EPO button? Or maybe we should change the system so that pushing marketing data refreshes the caches files automatically?
Blameless culture favors the latter actions over the former and tends to make your operation stronger and more resilient over time. The experts (and the novices) who made the mistake can speak freely about what happened and how we might prevent it, without fearing reprisal.
If someone repeatedly kills the site by mistake time after time, despite reasonable safeguards being in place, they should face disciplinary action. But when they make an honest mistake because we left an idling chainsaw laying around on the workbench, it makes no sense to blame them for grabbing it by mistake.
You are conflating criminal acts with engineering problems.
As stated earlier, blameless postmortems are for RCA of a particular incident. If you shoot every engineer who causes a incident you will succeed in having no incidents because no one will bring them up or making any changes for fear of getting shot.
You might want to, but whether you should do it is a separate question of its own.
If you promise people that there will be no blame, no punishment, no nothing, then they may speak more forthrightly. Do you want that honesty or do you prefer to retain the option of punishment?
because in the end the powers at work will make sure that the blame goes to some person turning a wrench instead of finding the real reason and the real source of the blame, most likely a process or inadequacy of redundancy/checks-and-balances would have been the real fix. Pointing at Max over in Wrenching because he left a wrench in the motor because he's been working double shifts for months on end does not fix future issues, and Hank the Replacement will likely make a similar mistake at some point in the future
Blameless culture is not about dodging responsibility. It’s about that when a process wrongly allowed a human to do X, the process is the issue to fix.
Of course you can go deeper and ask why was this process not done correctly etc but at the end of the day, it’s about actionable changes that ensure mistakes don’t get repeated.
Blaming process for everything is a symptom of this mindset. Not everything is a process issue. Process is the only thing you can blame with this mindset, but it will only fix process issues.
> Unless you just call everything a process: "His childhood was difficult and that's why he fouls people. Let's call his childhood a process."
Well... attempting to prevent stuff like bullying or domestic violence is a worthwhile goal in itself.
For the example of the soccer player, one might also question other incentives (e.g. bonuses tied to winning games no-matter-what), or why a player with a known history was hired in the first place.
I disagree - if 'everything can be a process' we wouldn't need human judgement anywhere - and clearly we clearly still do need humans in the loop - and the reality is the judgement of humans is not all created equal. Some are better than others.
I mean in theory, you're absolutely right but so rarely does it ever actually shake out that way. It seems like corporations continue to make the same mistakes while simultaneously being held less and less accountable.
Literally hundreds of people have died due to Boeing's negligence recently and the prevailing opinion seems to be that no one is ultimately going to be held accountable. (at least not meaningfully)
Ideals are great and all but if it results in zero accountability when hundreds of people die, maybe its time for us to re-evaluate.
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.
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)
> 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.
You are conflating "blameless culture" and blameless retrospectives culture.
You can 100% blame people for doing bad things. But in an engineering incident you want to find the RCA.
In SDE you may find the single git commit that took down everything, it has a author. Fine, there is blame. But why was there no review, no unit tests, no functional tests, QA, etc....
So you fire the engineer but make no other changes and it happens again, how is that helpful?
Same here, never understood the march towards 'blameless' culture - if someone is to blame, they should be blamed; if there is a pattern of mistakes they should be shown the door as quickly as possible.
Because if there is someone who is at fault, their reaction will be to throw someone else under the bus. So you may end up with a situation where the person being blamed isn't actually the person responsible for the accident.
I have worked in companies where the focus was finding who is responsible for failures. The result was that minor incidents were covered up to save bonuses and the problems (in the Problem Management context) that led to them were invisible to the management. When problems are invisible there is a tendency to push into safety margins to cut costs (known as normalisation of deviance) which ultimately leads to uncontrolled incidents.
In my current role I promote a blameless culture and the result is my team proactively raise incidents. We have more incidents than other teams but the incidents are generally controlled and problems are visible, prioritised and closed off. Coincidentally, my teams have record high Mean Times Between Failures and I'm now working with the other teams to fix their safety culture.
The lack of thinking about safety culture in this way is one of the reason that I don't believe most "Software Engineers" should be considered engineers.
> 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.
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.
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.
A simple example could be you asking your lawyer to prepare a contract for a deal. The deal is sealed but when shit hits the fan you realize the contract had huge holes in it.
Your lawyer is accountable for botching the contract, but at the end of the day you signed it so you're the one having full responsibility.
And we have that in spades in our work: you buy a license for a service, they're accountable but you're responsible.
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.)
> Accountability means something en[t]irely 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.
That's not how I would understand the word. It also isn't how dictionaries understand it.
Accountability means being subject to punishment. (That is, you can be "called to account".) It is, technically, different from responsibility - the word for someone who has accountability, but not responsibility, is scapegoat.
However, it is generally agreed that operating with scapegoats is both morally bad and bad for productivity (and the same goes for giving people responsibility without accountability), so responsibility and accountability aren't supposed to be separate concepts.
> However, it is generally agreed that operating with scapegoats is both morally bad and bad for productivity (and the same goes for giving people responsibility without accountability), so responsibility and accountability aren't supposed to be separate concepts.
I'd argue that higher management is usually accountable, but not responsible. Like, they can't guarantee fulfillment of the individual pieces of the work, but are still accountable for the whole effort anyway.
(this is going by the dictionary definition that responsibility is "task-oriented")
If that is colloquial meaning I'll play an ESL card and withdraw quietly with a new disdain for the word; it just seems to mean so many and so few things at once that I'm starting to wonder if it's ever the appropriate word to express an idea.
> accountable 1. (of a person, organization, or institution) required or expected to justify actions or decisions; responsible.
"parents could be held accountable for their children's actions"
So, it seems to mean you can justify your decision, which relates very directly to what the parent was talking about. You face punishment if, when called to account, you cannot explain what you did and why in a way that justifies your actions.
In my opinion, their description of the distinction made a lot of sense and provided me with a valuable tool for separating the two concepts.
edit: as I've thought about this more, I do see that the google quote literally includes the word "responsible" inside the definition of accountable, which goes against my point. I still really feel the distinction, especially the with the example of a person responsible but not accountable, seems sound and useful.
> "parents could be held accountable for their children's actions"
> So, it seems to mean you can justify your decision
No, not at all. If you can justify your decision, that doesn't mean you're being held accountable for it. Being held accountable means being punished, whether you can justify a decision or not. If you cannot be punished for something, then you are not accountable for it.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I was mainly responding to the previous post that implied the A220 was inherently nicer than a 737.
I looked up the Breeze example given, and while the seats and cabin do look amazing, I don’t see why the same couldn’t be equipped on a 737. That’s more a function of what the airline wants, isn’t it?
The A220 I rode definitely did not “feel big in the inside”.
Only lower demand could potentially translate into lower ticket prices. Why would a company lower prices (and profit) if people fly anyway at current prices?
well cheaper for the airline can lower the floor price. At some point it's no longer possible to make a profit at all, and over time the airline has to recognize that or go bankrupt
Personally, I think the issue isn't one of degrees or qualifications, but rather one of values.
The CEO prior to this one (Muilenburg) also had degrees in Aerospace Engineering, but chose to value profit maximization over things like security and a good engineering culture. Innocent people had to pay the price for it.
You're right about Calhoun- I was actually referring to Dennis Muilenburg, the CEO who was fired in 2019 after the two 737 MAX crashes and the subsequent groundings. My comment wasn't clear enough- I'll edit it for clarity.
What are you proposing then? The CEO not do…CEO stuff? This is a common no true Scotsman argument on HN, where ‘real engineers’ are treated as some sort of shorthand for “someone that has the same values that I do”.
I think he is proposing that tech company CEOs have some hands-on engineering experience at least for a short while. I agree with that - "MBA only" bosses really have no idea what it's like to be on the ground. I can't even emphasize how true this is, "no idea whatsoever" is a huge understatement. I thought they were faking to be lazy at first, but they really don't understand that some people need to actually do the work and what goes into it. And I say that as an MBA/CFA before engineering.
The only meaningful proposal is to fundamentally rethink the culture that’s eaten American companies since the 80s.
The fundamental issue is fiduciary duty getting warped by people like Milton Friedman into the modern meme that executives are legally obligated to maximize shareholder profits (effectively always in the short term).
Boeing is just the next of many, many cases of companies being destroyed by capitalism run rampant.
In my country to be an engineer I have to have a university degree of a certain kind, then do a state exam for the national engineering association, then pay a yearly fee to remain an engineer.
I'm a bit discontent how just about anyone of my coworkers in USA can be a whatever engineer :D
I personally don't see a big reason why the CEO of Boeing needs a Engineering degree. This seems to me to be a scapegoat, there are plenty of bad CEOs with Engineering degrees.
I'd argue that the COO or another position needs to have this qualification and have the power to bring up these risks to the CEO/Board. Someone needs to understanding engineering, be close to the ground but also have the power to bring things up to the CEO to make appropriate decisions.
If you had one, you would know how much you need to suffer to explain to non technical people why a development direction is better than another, and how much it will profit the company in the end.
You could tone this better. The clearest argument is that cost cutting for stock buybacks involves the same thinking, whether accountant or engineer. Since 2014, the CEO is explicitly compensated this way.
I can't tone this better. And a request about tone - while completely forgetting about the real problem - explains exactly what I mean with engineers not being listened to.
Non technical people are always talking about themeselves.
The whole point is that the previous CEO and the one that arguably kicked off this whole mess did in fact have both a degree and background in engineering. Your mindset and business philosophy matters far more than your degree.
> Your mindset and business philosophy matters far more than your degree.
I completely agree with you, and therefore with the idea that having a background in engineering is still not a guarantee of success or even good practices or good business philosophy.
I disagree however with parent's implication about those difficulties being some sort of justification for malpractice, and my argument is that having engineering-capable managers should mitigate those issues in a properly managed company.
No, the whole mess was created by the old McDonald managers in the old merger. Muilenburg inherited the MAX from McNerney, but you can easily blame his predecessor Stonecipher for all that Boeing mess, when they moved to Chicago and outsourced everything.
Again, you can push the blame back and back and back in time, but putting an engineer at the helm doesn't seem to have righted the ship either. Then it's not clear why such a background is necessary or sufficient for the successor in that position. Arguably the more important criteria may be that a candidate be from outside the Boeing organization, thus making them better suited to see beyond the existing structure and culture.
Once a company like Boeing is put on the slippery slope, it keeps going down south, until you make radical changes. Notice that in most of these engineering driving businesses, the culture was built bottom up, right from the birth of the company. You are now trying to restore that top down. Its not really possible.
People don't realise how hard it can be rebuild the organisation once sufficient corruption has set in. If you do away with top talent, processes and promote regular career managers to run things for you, they will do everything in their power to ensure no right people will ever rise to a position of power. This is for a simple reason that they feel a threat to their jobs.
At that point in time, there is no way a company can resurrected bottom up. Your only options are getting some great talent and then tearing apart the whole company and rebuilding it over time. This is not even possible after a while.
It's depressing how quickly the move has been from thriving Republic to downfall with very little actual Empire in the middle. The Romans at least got to enjoy a couple hundred years of wine, revelry and decadence before things broke down completely.
If you are part of the military industrial complex or the neocon establishment clique then the last three decades (since the start of the unipolar moment) have been extremely enjoyable and decadent as you get a free pass to milk the American empire.
You get lauded by the media as a hero for bombing arabs from the sky with zero possibility of defeat (and if the devastating horror inflected on the civilian population is revealed you get to throw the leakers in a dungeon - see Assange).
All the while transferring a huge chunk of taxpayer money to your chums by giving them lucrative defence contract to wage these pointless wars that do nothing strategically but extend the US debt to astronomical levels (which the entire world must finance due to the dollar hegemony), then in turn your chums reward you with board positions and various other kickbacks (book deals and university, think tank and media jobs).
You face zero possibility of being held accountable for your decisions because while politicians come and go your unelected position is secure and the population scarcely pays attention to foreign policy or public debt.
So when I first looked into Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrup-Grumman, L3Harris and others as an investor, I expected huge margins and booming profits.
Instead I found they have steady earnings with between -5 and +10 % margin. Hardly Republic-eating stuff.
I’m right there with you on public debt, although this is a problem throughout the rich world.
Profiteering from the military industrial complex is a much more subtle art than that. There are many sophisticated (and readable) studies about it which you can read.
Sometimes it is not even that subtle. Just take a few minutes to read about Blackwater.
See my other comment. There is no way to get a scale of it since it is not audited. All we see is the public debt ballooning while infrastructure around us is decaying. Where is the money going?
The deficit since October is roughly the same as all defense expenditures: https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/natio...
So even if they went to zero and didn’t have any effect on revenue, we’d still end up the year with debt ballooning. The lion share of expenditures are non-discretionary, and public debt increase is largely determined by demographics and interest rates.
Talk to people who work there a little higher up in the hierarchy. It’s a super sweet gig with very good money. And while making good money you can wrap yourself in patriotism.
This is conspiratorial thinking which rarely coincides with clear thinking.
You’re describing an incredibly dangerous and unstable game on their part. All it would take is one activist shareholder to blow that whole thing apart.
>All it would take is one activist shareholder to blow that whole thing apart.
The following fascinating story about stealing money from Pacific fleet operations mentions 27 (twenty seven) whistleblowers whose reports were ignored:
Government contract fraud of this kind on the order of couple of million up to a couple of hundred million here and there is terrible and people should go to prison.
It’s enough money to an enormous amount for an individual - ie, your DC friends could buy half a dozen really nice mansions or something.
This is kind of corruption should never be tolerated, but neither should it be mythologized and feared.
Like you don't understand that if you're a senior executive at a massive defense contractor you can hire former generals who just signed off on your bid to lucrative consulting agreements, you can put politicians on your board of directors (ie Nikki Haley @ Boeing) and employ their children's PR firms and "strategy consultancies" and so on.
It's not fraud in the legal sense, it's just disgusting and I agree it shouldn't happen. But it's all right out in the open and how the system works.
I'm not really asking if you agree, I'm describing something I have seen first hand.
First of all calm down please. I’m trying to have a factual and calm conversation.
Second of all OK nice and where is all that money going? Sure, generals as directors, politicians making killer stock investments. But I don’t see these trillions in the form of corporate profits, or missing tax money. The money is almost entirely accounted for (ie audited) and the numbers are reasonable.
The US pissed away a ton of money in the middle east, but that money is hardly missing - we know where it went.
It really is not conspiratorial thinking to say there is a huge amount of waste in the defence industry. We are talking tons of cash which absolutely nobody knows where it went.
The Pentagon has failed 6 straight audits. If you ever worked in corporate finance you know how epically dysfunctional financially a corporation must be to fail a single audit.
It has approx 4 trillion in assets. If only 5 -10 % of this is due to some kind of direct or indirect corruption we are talking about hundreds of billion in "waste".
Systematically making a huge (remember, we’re talking big enough to cause the downfall of the States) and then hiding the profits from retail investors? Different story.
Imagine the political windfall someone like Gary Gensler (SEC chair) or a Democrat could get from exposing that? The whole notion is very unstable.
It is indeed very unstable. This is exactly why Eisenhower (who was one of the most hawkish presidents) used his farewell address to warn the public about the growing malign influence of the military-industrial complex (when he coined the term) and which you somehow want to characterise as conspiratorial thinking.
Yes, I know all about Eisenhower and his warnings.
That doesn’t mean a conspiracy as described is feasible.
How could such a group steal enough money to ruin the US? Skimming a little bit off the top, sure, but large-scale, systematic diversion of so much public money that it ends Pax Americana… no.
There are records of where the money comes from, and where it goes. There are far too many people who could become instant public darlings by exposing it. It’s unstable.
Is this some kind of joke? Do you really think it's strange or unusual to suggest that there's a conflict of interest between professional manager and shareholders, and that the managers routinely rig things for their own personal benefit? We're both talking about the same country, the United States right? Have you ever heard of Jack Welch?
I agree with you, but putting let's not pretend that neocons are the only ones looting the treasury. There's plenty of Democrats getting fat and happy too.
I highly recommend "The Fourth Turning is Here" by Neil Howe. According to the generational theory he co-developed (1):
"The theory states that a crisis recurs in American history after every fourth generation which is followed by a recovery (high). During this recovery, institutions and communitarian values are strong. Ultimately, succeeding generational archetypes attack and weaken institutions in the name of autonomy and individualism, which eventually creates a tumultuous political environment that ripens conditions for another crisis"
We're in a crisis period now. In all his books have provided the best explanation for the highs and lows in American society
If you can't get to the book, just look him up in any podcast or YouTube. But really the books are where the really detailed, convincing evidence lives.
Crises culminating in wars going back to the 1400s, but yes, according to the theory this crisis period was triggered by the crash in 2008 and will likely climax sometime between 2028-2035. So this decade's gonna suck, will probably involve a war (civil or great power). But I err on the side that a conflict will leave the country stronger as happened in the past (no guarantee, especially if we lose a great power conflict) and America will be a more egalitarian, prosperous place by the 2040s. Thus the cycle will begin anew and the country will suck again circa 2115
Yeah like how spring leads to summer leads to autumn leads to winter leads to spring. Or how the sun rises. Or how people are born, grow up, then die. Yeah naturally trained to find patterns, all of it is an illusion.
Or, instead of superficial snark maybe look into the patterns people identify and see if they make any sense. This particular one does
The wrinkle in the generational hypothesis is that the "when" of a crisis being felt may depend on which generation you belong to.
The nature of the major trends in the US have been primarily economic: rising debt being kicked down towards younger people, asset prices rising and concentrating in fewer places. This trend favored the Boomer generation up until recently, since they had relatively more opportunities to get assets when they were young, many of them had long lives in good health, and they were still occupying job positions by the time their children had finished education, setting the stage for the younger cohorts being educated for things they couldn't be hired for. Now that the Boomers are exiting the workforce there's a different kind of turmoil taking place as the economy is trying to put different hands at the wheel. But it's not exactly a new crisis for someone who entered the workforce in the 2010's, it's just incrementally more intense and their sense of crisis may have hit at graduation or even before. In contrast it looks downright apocalyptic to older people who had a long career insulated from the effects of the trends only to abruptly retire into a world of Zoom meetings, high inflation, and understaffed healthcare, while the national leaders are suddenly making radical policy moves that offend their sensibilities.
The stage for crisis is properly set at this point because every generational cohort seems to recognize it as a crisis that needs a reframed social contract, instead of a "that's your problem, not mine". That kind of consensus is the dividing factor. But the specific grievances are a thing that were building up for decades.
Exactly. In his interviews he mentioned a lot of people at the time asked if 9/11 was the triggering of a crisis (the hypothesis had just been published in 1999) and no, it just kind of went by because the generations weren't aligned. Kind of like WW1. Was a major disruptor, but society continued down the same trajectory
Apparently in 1971 the Bretton-Woods agreement[1] was "suspended" and America went off the gold standard. Because the US dollar became both a fiat currency[2] and a reserve currency[3], it meant that we could print as much money as we like. Printing money directly fuels corruption and income inequality. Rather than reconciling bad decisions and balancing a budget, you just print more money. Financialization[4], a force which frequently gets referenced in Boeing threads, is just another consequence of poor monetary policy, as is decline of Rule of Law[5].
Ray Dalio's Principles for a Changing World Order is the best explanation I've seen for the general state of America and its clear decline (45m): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xguam0TKMw8
Exactly. Emmanuel Todd says it in his own way : in the US your best bet is always to work in or around finance, because printing money became the main business in the country. That's also why the US must import engineers massively, for instance. That's why the military industry is under such pressure, because it can't rely upon huge numbers of Indians, Chinese or Russians to conceive and build its airplanes, missiles and nuclear submarines.
There is plenty of corruption and income inequality regardless of money printing velocity. What would be the causal link between them? There was huge corruption in former Eastern/Soviet Block countries where prices were more or less stable. There was huge inequality in gold-standard feudalism.
Ray Dalio's video explicitly explains the causal link between printing money and corruption.
Printing money (as a fiat reserve currency) implies the decline of rule of law and therefore corruption, but corruption does not imply that money was printed, nor does the lack of printing money imply low corruption.
I think if you draw out the logical statements I've made one implication correctly. I claimed A implies B is a true statement and that if A implies B is true, that doesn't mean B implies A or ~A implies ~B. (although ~B does imply ~A if A implies B).
True:
A implies B: Printed money implies a rise of corruption
~B implies ~A: Low corruption implies money wasn't printed
False:
B implies A: A rise in corruption implies printed money
~A implies B: Not printing money implies low corruption
I did not say A and B are independent, I said A implies B, not A IFF B.
Almost everyone now can afford wine and some decadance, from a Roman standard. Roman decadence was grapes and wine and meats and sex. Far more people now have access to far better things than the Romans ever experienced.
I'm not saying it could :) I'm just commenting on the "powerful Americans" line, above.
I.e. what they called decadent we call normal, in no small part due to Americans who grew powerful (or rather, rich) by delivering increased value to ordinary people.
From what I've read, the best years were during the "Five Good Emperors" period, so about a century, but even during the civil unrest periods things were OK if you stayed in your villa with your slaves and vineyards (OK relative to the poor, of course).
> but even during the civil unrest periods things were OK if you stayed in your villa with your slaves and vineyards
Well, I mean, this is if you happened to be very rich. Also, of course, for quite a bit of the period it put you in the firing line for proscription, and other Rich Roman Hazards. Particularly after the end of the Republic, the Roman Empire tended to be a fairly hazardous place for rich people; odds were good that you'd end up, at least passively, on the Wrong Side at some point.
I'm currently listening around the final years of the Flavian dynasty and I'm wondering when these "couple hundred years of wine, revelry and decadence [in the post-Augustian Empire]" are supposed to arrive.
This is worth meditating! The American empire, like the British before it and the other european while we're at it, are flashes in the pan compared to the Romans, the Byzantines, the Ottomans. It could be that hypocrisy, racism and just wanting the oil/diamonds/gold/consumers is not a formula for lasting success.
Depressing, perhaps, if you're part of the nobility. Heartening, perhaps, of you're one of the workers building the palaces of revelry but never getting to enjoy them.
Essentially, society is highly inequitable, instability is to be expected and is probably only a negative if you're living it up. If you're part of the higher classes gaining rent -- in any form -- from others needs then you'd probably want this 'empire' to live for ever.
Where do people get these class warfare talking points? Is there a new wave of teenagers discovering Das Kapital and then saying stuff like this online?
"Where do people get these class warfare talking points? "
There does seem to be a segment of people that aren't super rich, but are rich enough to be isolated and don't realize there is a huge number of people really struggling. They don't seem to realize 'poor' people exists. Or think they should just get a job.
Typically, this class of 'bour·geoi·sie' don't realize they are benefiting from the 'class war' being waged by the super rich, and that they are actually winning.
America also has good Geography, farm land, rivers, peaceful boarders(despite the rhetoric), oceans for protection.
And, convenient plagues upon settlement, pretty much an empty continent with all of these plentiful resources. Which caused a huge spring board effect.
It's basically an entire country that has survivor bias.
> Humanity has never needed billionaires and only in abstract theory does their existence benefit the rest.
I’ve witnessed how decisions are made in a country with no billionaires - they were made by Politburo guys. I’ve also witnessed how decisions are made by Elon Mask. I’d have Mask over Politburo every time.
Billionaires are just centers of power who are not subject to the Party ideology and control. Why would anyone refuse having the power more distributed?
We used to have strong unions that built a strong middle class. Now everyone's out for themselves and real wages are 1/3rd what they were for our grandparents. We have record numbers of the upper class, and fewer middle class each year.
A lot of people want a middle class life and are seeing the connection between strong unified bargaining and their chances to become middle class.
Once you get a step further than that you'll realize that unions are another mechanism used to control labor[0] and that federal reserve policy on down is designed explicitly to suppress wages[1] so really the only solution is to make politicians fear the people again.
[1-1]eg. 2% inflation target was originally suggested as it allowed employers to not give raises and lower their employee expenses over time
[1-2]eg. interest rates were only raised once wages started ticking upward after decades of stagnation and decline, inflation in every other area of the marketplace wasn't a concern and you were labeled some sort of "inflation nut" if you mentioned it
[1-3] now consider trade tariffs that encourage firms to offshore, lack of immigration enforcement creating a unlimited supply of low skill labor, use of below minimum wage prison labor to dilute the power of workers not in prison, welfare programs that subsidize low wage workers who otherwise wouldn't be able to afford working for a employer and you start to think this isn't just a happy accident for the capital class that the world is arranged in this very specific way benefitting them.
> A lot of people want a middle class life and are seeing the connection between strong unified bargaining and their chances to become middle class.
... and the connection between post-Soviet rabid capitalism (I know, the onset of Thatcherism was before that - but only after the USSR collapsed, rabid capitalism really began to take up speed), globalization for goods but not people, and resulting widespread destruction in domestic low-level employment (mining, factories) also becomes more and more apparent.
Everyone always has, and always will be, looking out for themselves. It’s biological.
I agree that free markets plus free unionization can lead to great results (look at Sweden - no labour laws and strong unions and high wages).
But this hankering for a catastrophically flawed social system (built-in hate for other classes?!) that depends on changing human nature and thus never works is even cringier than Ayn Rand-quoting teenagers who want no government at all.
I don't think the US created these laws just to be nice to people.
Corporations were literally hiring private armies and killing people. So the people voted for laws. Maybe they seem antiquated now, but they did have a reason for being.
And, if there is a class system, like if you are born rich, you get to be rich, if you are born poor you get to stay poor. Then it seems natural to start to dislike each other. How can you fault people born into poverty for disliking the people creating a system to keep them there?
Labor laws are literally created because politicians are trying to win votes by being nice to at least some of the people. Democracy at work.
I’d like to see some numbers for how many people are getting slaughtered in the streets by these roving private armies that have the keys to the city.
And as for the class system, have a look at social mobility now versus 100 years ago vs 1000 years ago vs 10k years ago. Progress remains to be made, but society has never been more fluid and fair.
The laws aren't new. Like they were created last year for an election. They were born out of the early 19 century industrialization/gilded age. Maybe they should be updated, but you are really miss-categorizing the history.
And, social mobility has gone down, the American Dream is gone for a lot of people. Is it still better than being a feudal serf? sure, but don't worship what it has become?
Social Mobility:
Can go find all the sources here. But these are nice summaries.
I've worked in union and non-union plants. I can tell you, non-union is no paradise, they have worse safety conditions and worse attitudes and lower pay.
Definitely in non-union plants the workers are just meat.
All the libertarians with their ideals about small government and 'individual rights' are just playing into the corporate desires. Because the more people can be separated into 'individuals', then they can be picked off one by one. You're driving into a dystopian hell scape with eyes wide open.
Government is by the people, for the people, which in todays world is treated like 'socialism'.
CEOs don't like this fact, because it severely limits their career opportuninties.
In Italy we had Marchionne more or less an insurance salesman.
He lead FIAT group into oblivion, he tried to clear the books by simply canceling the development of a car model. Instead, he destroyed the company.
Look at cheap electric chinese cars. Tech is old and perfect for Italy.
He simply didn't understand the technology.
He was a backward guy who only knew merges and finance. If you run a car company, you need to understand the product. You can't survive long without that.
From what I'm seeing the EV sales (or the lack of thereof) are a drain for all the other companies like BMW, Ford, Mercedes, etc. so not sure how having an EV would help them out?
Chinese electric cars are cheap because they are subsidized.
You should really compare with other European car manufacturers.
I'm not a fan of Fiat, but if they did huge investments into electric 10+ years ago that possibly could bankrupt the company. Market is not ready even now for going all electric.
The second-gen Multipla was a lot more normal-looking than the original.
> Fiat was always a cheap cars brand, none will go and buy expensive electric Fiat.
In Ireland, the Fiat 500e is 24k EUR; I'm pretty sure it's their second-cheapest car, after the ordinary Fiat 500, which is about 20k. Anecdotally, I see a good few Fiat 500es around; it seems to be one of the more popular small (A-segment) electric cars. I suspect that had an earlier version existed 10 years ago, it would've done pretty well in a market then dominated by the Nissan Leaf.
Stellantis, which is the result of lots of mergers that include Fiat, now makes quite a few successful electrical cars. Including some low end cheap ones around 20K euro. And a few city cars priced even cheaper than that. So, they are a bit ahead of other manufacturers that are looking to catch up in the next few years to where Stellantis is right now.
This CEO was involved with the acquisition of Chrysler after they went bankrupt. That combination is generally considered successful and it was a major coup for Fiat which until then had no real presence in the US. Stellantis which they are now a part of seems to do well lately; including in the US where they have a few iconic brands. Stellantis market share grew quite a bit last year. And they are launching lots of EVs for the different brands in their company this year targeting markets all over the world.
Fiat as a brand still exists and Stellantis still has production and R&D in Italy. Though they did announce some layoffs in Italy recently.
I was not expecting the design of the new Charger EV to be so inspired. My head hasn't been turned by a car since the 2014 Chevy Impala. This new Charger is an order of magnitude beyond that.
The Fiat is desirable from a design point of view. I think prices are around the 30K mark in Europe. So a bit cheaper than a Tesla. I've no idea what the Californian market is for these things. Teslas are nice in other ways but they aren't that special from a design point of view. It's a bit of a bland, inoffensive and generic look.
Stellantis has other cars based on the same tech and platform that are even more affordable. The new Citroen e-C3 starts around 20K euros. That's one of the more basic Stellantis offerings. Well below what Tesla is planning/rumored to launch next year or so. I doubt they will sell that in the US. And import tariffs keep a lot of otherwise fine cars off the market there.
That's what's great about being CEO. No matter what you do, it really doesn't matter and noone can evaluate what you did to any significan level of confidence.
I have no doubt that before the first MAX crash, the Financial Times was gushing about how great a value the Boeing stock was, with the order books being full for the years to come...
Well, order books are probably really full because for an Airline it is cheaper to pay for the death of the customers than to pay for the training of 3000 pilots and technicians and finally switching from Boeing to Airbus.
Engineering teaches problem-solving, critical thinking, and a systematic approach to addressing issues—all valuable in developing a strong security culture. A CEO who understands the technical intricacies of aircraft manufacturing is more likely to prioritize safety and security as non-negotiable aspects of the business model.
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."
The 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.
This 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.
I 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.
In 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.
I 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.
No. Capitalism has the race-to-the-bottom problem, but it's not necessary to engage in it. Shareholder value is not intrinsically defined as a short-term construct, or even a monetary one; that's just how it's seen by fuckwit markets and boards.
It 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.
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.
It'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.
You 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.
"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.
He 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.
The 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.
One of the fine things in the Starship Troopers (the book) was that no one can become supreme commander without climbed high in both the army and the navy.
You have to know engineering so that engineers can't push you around and you have to know business side so that the bean counters can't push you around. But most important you have to have a person with the right values. Rigid quality control becoming the top priority right now. Also optimizations of the whole development process. Things right now are taking too much time and money.
Boeing needs to go through the reorg process NASA did after Challenger and Columbia. Identify the organizational causes and rework organizational incentives to prioritize safety culture. They've already had two fatal flights and several more serious incidents, it's past time they did this already.
All the big companies started with Engineers. It seems companies have a life-cycle. Engineers are at the kick off, growth stage. But later it is accountants or marketing that take lead and then it kind of goes into slow decline.
GaTech ChE here, married to a very successful GaTech ChE, been battling the financial efficiency wars for a quite a few decades: never met an engineer who couldn't be bought when the downside was (realistically, short term) job security. You get married to a company and job mobility is very constrained.
Credentials at the top don't mean that the process culture from the neck down isn't rotten.
I quit a cushy, maybe even a galactic set of Gubmint jobs when I was a young whippersnapper because I wanted to go to where the real work was getting done, in the F500 corporate world. Bell Labs, baby.
I think you've mistaken the UAE (United Arab Emirates, flag carriers being Emirates and Etihad) for the KSA (Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, flag carrier being Saudia ). These are different countries (and airlines).
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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.