But a good job for a CEO is building shareholder value, which is now understood as "[wringing] all the money out of the company that they can [for the shareholders]." That's a different job than building an organization that consistently chooses safety over schedule and cost.
... is apparently the argument.
I mean, see also: drug tests for the minimum wage workers, but the CEO? Of course not. Mere employees better not be moonlighting or doing anything else, but the CEO? On two other boards, "advising" a startup on the side, working on another part-time (also as CEO—their "executive assistant" at their 20-person startup actually runs the company)
The issue with the 737MAX is that Boeing was too risk-averse: they should have made a brand new plane, but went with what they thought was the low-risk route with the 737 re-engine. The 787 disastrous development ($36B of deferred production costs I think) was certainly a huge cause of this.
if they just stuck to evaluating technical risk first, and only then the risk of selling the plane - perhaps that route would have led them to developing a new completely plane.
But then again it's so obvious in his case, I mean I and probably many saw it coming — the man just does not operate at the same level, he's stellar you know, like the Jobs and Musks and Waltons of this world).
I have no hope for Boeing to recruit such a great man, I don't think that kind of business actually wants that. Imagine a Dorsey / Musk disruptor, pushing open standards, thinking of direct B2C, whatever... That just wouldn't fly with Boeing's board and mindset (oh pun so very much unintended yet so apt).
It seems to me that if the promise of a golden parachute led to CEOs simply not caring if they do well or not, then there'd be no point in paying them well or trying to hire the best. Heck, there'd be no measure of "best", because all the candidates would just have a string of disasters behind them.
There's an S curve to the utility of money. Anyone who works at the kind of level that could become the CEO of a company like Boeing is already quite rich. So money alone isn't the incentive. But thinking of money as sole incentive is kind of characteristic for those of us who actually have to work for a living.
Why are you assuming that I think money is their only incentive?
I was replying to a comment contemplating that "the incentives may be correct now". The amount of money guaranteed to executives chasing short-termism provides a perverse incentive working against any desire to do their job well. There are multiple incentives, but they are not aligned.
> There's an S curve to the utility of money.
Seems to me that it's more like a bell curve, with the optimal center waaaay to the left of where it is today. Pay too much money and the temptation for CEOs to max out their own gains at the expense of the company's long term health rises.
That's the smell of 300 souls:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_London_School_explosion
Pretty much all safety measures are written in blood.
We have culturally evolved to care more about physical safety today; a good sign that our State worked by being held accountable to people. The stuff that is happening with Boeing is a total regression, and it will be interesting to see how regressions like this can be prevented in the future.
I understand that ensuring the safety of new airplane designs is more complicated than adding odor to natural gas. But this is not a product where society wants producers to "move fast and break things". We expect a minimum level of safety i.e the plane not falling out of the sky.
I very highly recommend Charles Perrow's work, particulary Normal Accidents and The Next Disaster. Perrow himself died just this past November.
https://www.worldcat.org/search?q=au%3APerrow%2C+Charles%2C&...
I've been clipping similar stories, under a set of themes which I find related:
- Risk
- Accidents
- Technological Debt
- Techology as Debt
- Manifestation -- this is the notion of manifest vs. latent phenomena, perceptibility, and awareness. See Robert K. Merton among others.
- Denial. Itself one of the stages of grief, which seems more generally a response to a change in worldview and/or an invalidation of previously reliable models.
- Motivated asset inflation. The desire to sustain high levels of valuation of extant assets (real property, IP, technological mechansism, rents), often through activities which decrease net social welfare. Bernhard J. Stern's "Resistances to the Adoption of Technological Innovations", 1937, is fascinating reading in this regard. Stern doesn't quite fully make the case, but he sets the board for the final mate. NIMBYism, Merchants of Doubt, "fake news", and numerous other phenomena can be tied to this.
In whole, the narrative, if it is valid and holds, undermines many of the sacred cows of technological optimism and property-based market economics.
I'd mentioned it on G+ on the date, in comments (I've a full archive on my own systems, but at least the post survives at the Internet Archive):
https://web.archive.org/web/20190115030822/https://plus.goog...
Brought up as well on this post (also not in a captured comment):
https://web.archive.org/web/20190115024757/https://plus.goog...
Because consumers will choose the cheaper product. If a politician tries to "value" safety over convenience for a potential problem, voters will vote for the other politician that promises lower taxes and claims there is no safety issue.
Of course, there is a balance that needs to be met, taking all of the risk out of life is also excessive and may impede progress or waste resources.