One important factor that the article does not engage is financialization. For financialized business, doing what is says on the sign is only a cover. This of course affects many other industries as well.
One of the former CEOs called engineers who care too much about quality "assholes" because they don't care about the stock price, so he actively made efforts to chase them off. How can you possibly think that the quality of the products and stock price are completely disconnected?
These people really are the Tommy Wiseau of running a business. They kind of know what it looks like, but get so many details wrong and the end result is completely absurd and doesn't work at all, so all you can do is laugh at it.
Hence, aren't people always talking about improving the stock price just targeting the metrics instead of focusing on the interesting part?
That is a hypothesis from the 1990s. Turns out that incentives need to be better aligned over time than what stock prices can manage
People $4,000 for brand-name Whatever™ designer clothes. It's not really worth $4,000 in any real sense, other than what someone is willing to pay for it.
Boeing had all the required systems in place. Even 2x the quality systems they needed.
None if this matters if people are playing legal word games with quality requirements instead of basic engineering. Technically following a rule might win in court, but it wont win over physics.
Well put. The MBA-isation of America is a cancer.
Buyin' you a drink.
Yeah, unless one gives a full picture of this environment, that this is how investment works today, all the exposes in the world wind-up just someone crying over their beer about "back in my day, they cared about quality".