<i>> Everybody thinks his business is different, because everybody is the same. Nobody. Is. Different. [from a wall street analyst about Boeing]</i><p>This in a nutshell represents the core failure of modern managerial thinking. What started as "scientific management" many decades ago, an attempt to systematically understand how corporations should operate, quickly evolved into a group think belief that management could function as fungible & completely replaceable units of work-- that a "manager" could be trained up in various basic principles and plugged into any role<p>There are of course commonalities across businesses, and commonalities across managers for necessary skill, but each business is, in some core, fundamental way, <i>different</i> from others. Good management of a company doesn't following a paint-by-numbers rule book, it requires deep understanding of the particulars of <i>that</i> business, the market & industry it operates in.<p>I think this is changing, slowly, but the legacy of this flawed thinking is a long one.
Early in my career when I encountered outsourcing initiatives I perceived them as management choosing cost over quality. A couple of decades later my view has changed on that mostly thanks to having worked more directly within the management structure of numerous companies (ranging from startup to ConglomCo Megasized).<p>In most cases those making the decision really believe they can achieve comparable results by outsourcing while also taking advantage of global wage differences and also converting the continual overhead of personnel into just-in-time overhead that only has to be taken on as needed. This is not unlike the devops trend towards using cloud-based infrastructure.<p>The problem is that the thinking that you achieve comparable results by outsourcing is woefully naive. In-house teams have a vested interest in understanding the business problems as well as filling in the communications gap between what is asked for vs what is actually desired as an outcome. Outsourced contracted labor does not share those same interests.
Additionally, when you outsource technical labor you MUST have the ability internally to create very good designs, specifications, and oversight/feedback mechanisms to ensure that you're getting what you wanted rather than what you asked for via sloppy communication. For those companies that have previously had internal teams and decide to transition to external resources they almost never have someone with that ability and in fact are unaware of the impedance mismatch between their asks and the results delivered by internal teams.<p>Outsourcing means trading the overhead of personnel costs for the overhead of a much more complex and difficult communications burden. It is extraordinarily rare that the company that opts to transition from internal to outsourced talent has the capability or even awareness of that trade, resulting in predictably poor results.
Couldn't resist posting this excerpt:<p>---<p><i>And while Boeing’s engineers toiled to get McDonnell’s lemon planes into the sky, their own hopes of designing a new plane to compete with Airbus, Boeing’s only global market rival, were shriveling. Under the sway of all the naysayers who had called out the folly of the McDonnell deal, the board had adopted a hard-line “never again” posture toward ambitious new planes. Boeing’s leaders began crying “crocodile tears,” Sorscher claimed, about the development costs of 1995’s 777, even though some industry insiders estimate that it became the most profitable plane of all time. The premise behind this complaining was silly, Sorscher contended in PowerPoint presentations and a Harvard Business School-style case study on the topic. A return to the “problem-solving” culture and managerial structure of yore, he explained over and over again to anyone who would listen, was the only sensible way to generate shareholder value. But when he brought that message on the road, he rarely elicited much more than an eye roll. “I’m not buying it,” was a common response. Occasionally, though, someone in the audience was outright mean, like the Wall Street analyst who cut him off mid-sentence: </i><p><i>“Look, I get it. What you’re telling me is that your business is different. That you’re special. Well, listen: Everybody thinks his business is different, because everybody is the same. Nobody. Is. Different.” </i><p><i>And indeed, that would appear to be the real moral of this story: Airplane manufacturing is no different from mortgage lending or insulin distribution or make-believe blood analyzing software—another cash cow for the one percent, bound inexorably for the slaughterhouse.</i>
You often hear about required ethics courses for engineers, but it strikes me that it is management that most requires this. The whole MBA thing & the implied notion of managerialism has been a straight up disaster to everything it has touched (other than, of course, the enriching of the 0.1%)
Also worth noting is the House Aviation Subcommittee's take on the problem:<p><i>The panel’s majority members were best embodied by subcommittee Chairman Rick Larsen, an ex-lobbyist New Democrat who delivered an opening statement of head-scratching insipidness: “As I have said before, if the public does not feel safe about flying then they won’t fly; if they don’t fly, airlines don’t need to buy airplanes; if they don’t need to buy airplanes, then airplanes don’t need to be built; and if there is no need to build airplanes, then there will be no jobs in aviation.”</i><p>Followed by Congressman Paul Mitchell's lambasting of Captain Dan Carey, the outgoing president of the Allied Pilots Association, for having the temerity to go public with his concerns: <i>"What’s the value [of releasing a secret recording] to the system or the families?... Explain to me what warranted that, sir!"</i> Clearly, the problem here is that the travelling public, and victims' families, have come to learn about MCAS and its role in recent crashes.<p>When you are trying to spin a story, however, it can be difficult to keep it straight. Here's Sam Graves, ranking Republican on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee:<p><i>“It’s not the plane I’m concerned about; I think the plane is very safe. We need to concentrate on the pilot ... being trained [for] the aircraft, and being able to fly a plane and not just fly the computer.”</i><p>His blame-the-pilots rhetoric does not look so good for Boeing now that we are learning the lengths it went to in order to avoid there being any additional training for pilots.
Probably the most interesting and relevant part to HN<p>> It smacked of the sort of screwup a 23-year-old intern might have made—and indeed, much of the software on the MAX had been engineered by recent grads of Indian software-coding academies making as little as $9 an hour, part of Boeing management’s endless war on the unions that once represented more than half its employees
I think that a lot of times management believes it's only job is to cut corners. In those cases, maybe it's better not to have managers.<p>Maybe if engineers were properly incentivized by profit sharing or something, they could help maximize profits without throwing out everything else like managers keep urging them to.
I think a much better view of the issue is in the NY Times
<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/magazine/boeing-737-max-crashes.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/magazine/boeing-737-max-c...</a>
This is a great article and now I am appalled at so many things. But the line that touched me profoundly is at the end where the father and the husband of 4 victims says this:<p>“I am empty,” he told the committee. “My life has no meaning.”<p>I can only imagine the pain he is experiencing.
Everybody should read David Packard's address to HP Managers in 1960. This was a time when HP was truly a great company.<p><a href="https://gizmodo.com/the-hp-way-how-bill-hewlett-and-i-built-our-company-5634378" rel="nofollow">https://gizmodo.com/the-hp-way-how-bill-hewlett-and-i-built-...</a><p>To me, this is what i consider as true "Management" and not the BS that passes for it today.
I like to imagine a fantasy United States where the FAA (et al) would have stepped in, removed all the MBAs, and set the company on a sane course.
More practically, I wonder what could be done to create structural impediments to the kind of managerial death-cult described in the article. For instance, I see no reason a company should be allowed to buy its own stock. How about requiring corporate boards to have at least 51% of non-stockholders?
We should remember that corporations are purely social constructs. There is no natural law that they must not be interfered with, that only market mechanisms should control then. We created corporations for social good, and can alter them.
This call-out quote hits very close to home for me:<p><i>You are in a mature industry that is no longer innovative; it’s a commodity business. The last great innovation capable of driving major growth in aviation was the jet engine back in the 1950s, and every technological advance since has been incremental. And so the emphasis of the business is going to switch away from engineering and toward supply-chain management. Because every mature company has to isolate which parts of its business add value, and delegate the more commoditylike things to the supply chain. The more you look to the market for pricing signals, the more the role of the engineer will shrink.</i>
I am as outraged at Boeing's ineptitude as anybody with a rational mind, but I can't read this kind of article without cringing. Sentences like "about two weeks after the system’s unthinkable stupidity drove the two-month-old plane and all 189 people on it to a horrific death" should raise alarm bells in any reader's mind.
This is probably a writer who knows nothing about aviation and/or software engineering yet feels very comfortable calling a system "unthinkably stupid". This smacks of oversimplification and just plain sloppiness.
There are many articles on the entire debacle that are a lot more measured, and smart about their analysis, including quite a few great reads that were mentioned here in HN.
The author states:<p>>"Southwest always had a lot to say about projected modifications to the 737, and Kelleher’s team mostly wanted as few technical modifications as possible. With the MAX, they upped the ante: According to Rick Ludtke, a former Boeing employee, Boeing agreed to rebate Southwest $1 million for every MAX it bought, if the FAA required level-D simulator training for the carrier’s pilots"<p>This seems like an important part of the story yet I'm not understanding if it's inclusion is meant to have significance to the tragedies of the 737. Could someone explain how of if this is germane to the crashes?
The moral of this story seems to be "buy Airbus shares".<p>Maybe Lockheed Martin will buy up Boeing as distressed assets and do something with it?
Lack of openness, and tolerance for politics at corporate offices ... jfk ... bane of many people's misery. VW is another one except that it was an on purpose.
> It is understood, now more than ever, that capitalism does half-assed things like that<p>Such a non-insightful aside. Boeing produced many excellent planes, and during that time functioned quite well in a capitalist system. In fact, was enabled by it. As if a non-functioning managerial class never could happen in a socialist bureaucracy.<p>Buying MD seems like it was mostly motivated by the profitability of defense contracts, which usually just end up distorting a company's priorities, and which are driven by decidedly non-capitalistic requirements of the military. HP avoided defense contracts for decades for this very reason.<p>Hopefully Boeing will return to its capitalist roots and realize that it needs to use the capital it has to satisfy the needs of its customers by building great planes.
On the other hand, "Air Disasters" S13 E2 is about the crash of an Airbus A300 that stalled and crashed. The reason was because Airbus changed the way the "go round" mode worked, and the pilots were not aware of it nor were trained on it. The pilots kept pushing the nose down and the automation kept pulling it up, until it crashed.<p>Airbus also has an Airworthiness Directive out on it for pitch instability:<p>" This AD was prompted by analysis of the behavior of the elevator aileron computer (ELAC) L102 that revealed that excessive pitch attitude can occur in certain conditions and during specific maneuvers. This AD requires revising the airplane flight manual (AFM) to incorporate updated procedures and operational limitations, as specified in a
European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) AD, which is incorporated by reference. The FAA is issuing this AD to address the unsafe condition on these products."<p><a href="http://rgl.faa.gov/Regulatory_and_Guidance_Library/rgad.nsf/0/6aeb8ae4513720768625845e00444321/$FILE/2019-15-02.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://rgl.faa.gov/Regulatory_and_Guidance_Library/rgad.nsf/...</a>
<i>Nearly</i> TWO DECADES <i>before Boeing’s MCAS system crashed two of the plane-maker’s brand-new 737 MAX jets, Stan Sorscher knew his company’s increasingly toxic mode of operating would create a disaster of some kind. A long and proud “safety culture” was rapidly being replaced, he argued, with “a culture of financial bullshit, a culture of groupthink.”</i> (Emphasis added).<p>But, the situation is that US air travel got safer during a lot of those two decades. Indeed, the two crashes world aren't enough to push air travel back two decades and safety standards and the rarity of crashes were enough catch the problem.<p>The 737 Max is a huge problem for Boeing in particular, creating a situation where the endgame is hard to see. But not as much for air travel generally, which continues to be cheap and safe. And Boeing made a lot of planes and lot of money in the last two decades.<p>Which is to say when things are "pushed to boards", it's hard to say exactly when they give out. The 737 Max system was about minimizing costs everywhere in the system - costs in testing, costs in training and costs in operation. The multilevel Rube Goldberg approach finally failed but it's had a long run, the 737 800 is a workhorse of air travel.<p>Still, I suppose the lesson is multilevel optimization can result in a catastrophic systems failure. There are probably much processes where this could happen - just think when all the cars are Internet connected.