If you want cultural change you need a CEO that wants that and knows how to get there - which is not an engineering problem.
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.
Of course: I’m biased.
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.
Yes, that's what we are all saying.
Also, performance measures play a role.
I found this, for example, which says there is no relationship: https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2011/06/18/does-ceo-educatio...
> 32 have an MBA, up from 29 last year. 34 have an engineering degree, up from 32 last year.
It has shifted further in this direction since, especially with 2020.
https://hbr.org/2018/11/the-best-performing-ceos-in-the-worl...
Edit: the point has been made. Please do some of your own research rather than constantly sea lioning.
https://www.quora.com/What-is-it-called-when-someone-keeps-a...
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.
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:
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/11/07/tech/australia-optus-netw...
She's since quit as Optus CEO in an "I don't want to fix my own mess" move. She doesn't seem to have paid that much attention to Optus anyway:
https://www.afr.com/rear-window/optus-a-part-time-gig-for-ce...
What if CEO build other things than planes?
Putting inexpert people in positions of authority is guaranteed to damage a business, as Boeing is now finding out.
Should experts always be in control everywhere or are there limits?
There are downsides to that, which is why we don't do it. You can judge for yourself if those same downsides apply to Boeing.
In the same way, I couldn't say if Boing would need something more closer to a priest or a technocrat.
And the military doesn't run the government. That's also a good thing.
The only way your analogy works is if you think it's a good idea to appoint generals and admirals who have no military experience. I hope you don't.
Anyway, why not under certain circumstances? Already now there are differences between countries what is run by the military and what isn't.
Because someone with no military experience is inexpert. They don't know what they're doing.
In the military a lack of expertise is very likely to result in people dying unnecessarily.
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.
The equivalent here would be the customers.
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.
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.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/10/22/more-top-...
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.
I’ve already established higher performance in the many replies I have given to your many comments.
Have a great day!
"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, ...
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happytiger 2 hours ago | root | parent | next [–]
There is. You’re flat out incorrect."
You never established higher performance.
Have a great day
As you point out lots of other choices.
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.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/insead/2014/05/29/why-engineers...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/10/22/more-top-...
The CEO being an engineer is not sufficient for success.
Your core arguments are ever changing throughout this thread, and on every reply.
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....
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, ...
> 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.
I wish you well. I hope you have a great day.
Have a great day.
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.
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.
I disagree that quality is specific to engineering. Lots of other fields understand quality, too.
Let’s use your argument: Would you hire a lawyer to captain a ship? Why not? It’s not like the captain actually steers the ship or oils the engine.
You see? It’s not that hard to think a tiny tiny little bit.
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*.
I'd say there are number of industries and backgrounds a "quality in production" CEO could come from.
Edit: I even agree with need to understand the market and manufacturing, but it could come from being an engineer, a physicist, a mathematician etc.
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.
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.