Boeing is made up of a lot of people, some who have done their absolute best. They don't deserve the failure that their leadership caused. I feel bad for Boeing employees, but I don't feel bad for their management.
The reality is often a lot more complex and nuanced.
The issue with Boeing is less any individual and more institutional decay. Over time, a spigot of effectively unconditional cash corrupts an organization, especially once anyone with enough internal weight to fight against it is no longer involved in the day-to-day. Give it 20 years, and SpaceX will be the same way.
<cough> 737MAX
> It doesn't excuse the decay and issues, but this isn't a case where everything they do is faulty. they're just held to an extremely high bar.
... only to the bar they set themselves with the older 737s?
We want it all to be a matter of just one or two incompetent individuals, because then the solution is simple. We just need to be aware that incompetent individuals exist, and through sheer force of will we can prevent them from destroying great things! But a much darker possibility is that it's something inherent to complex systems. Then, there's nothing to do to escape the inevitable cycle. Whatever brilliant schemes we come up with are doomed to failure, because the issue isn't individuals being stupid but institutional incapability to repair itself.
Apple is one of the halves of the phone duopoly sadly, so it will take a long time for them to pay for Cook's decisions this time.
I hope to be alive long enough to see how Toyota's story plays out. They seemed to have lost their way under Akio Toyoda. We'll see if Koji Sato can get them back on track.
I'm also keenly interested in Haier and its "Rendanheyi model". They're worthy of HBR style case studies, receiving at least as much attention as Apple, Sony, Honda, Toyota, etc. And yet we know so little about them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haier
In 2021, Liang Haishan succeeded Haier's legendary CEO Zhang Ruimin. What happens next? Continued success? Long slow decline? Jump into a volcano?
I'd love to know.
But among other things they are subject to the dictator trap, and of course they have a best before date.
So a visionary leader is a good person to have during bootstrap, but then your processes need to become self-sustaining.
This has not been true at any job I’ve had, from working in fast food as a teenager to now being a data scientist. What you describe would be exceptional in almost any company, where things otherwise regress to the mean of these various aspects, or, in especially bad circumstances, go south of that. Boeing would seem to be in the latter category at this point.
I really want to know about studies being done in this area.
Sure, on an individual basis, you have pockets of amazing managers that can't overcome organizational inertia. I feel for them as well, but when organizational failures come into play, I'm certainly taking more pity on the employees then the managers.
It's possible for the underlings to be good despite bad management, but if the underlings are bad that is again a consequence of poor management.
The only exception would be deliberate sabotage, which is not unknown but incredibly rare.
It should rub you the wrong way. It denies both the agency and the moral obligation of the professionals working under the managers.
Managers too, though ultimately this failure must come down to management at some (presumably high) level.
So not everyone who is not a manager is good, but almost all top-level managers are bad. They need to be in order to make the decisions needed to advance short term profit before all else.
There are bad employees but they have less influence over the company overall.
From my limited experience with megacorps, and lots of reading, persons Director level and up are bat guano insane. Execs live in their own separate Machiavellian fantasy world bubble. Any nod to reality (eg rocket go boom) is a selfown for corporate ladder climbers.
Any productive work at an org like Boeing, post infection by MD's leeches, is in despite of "managagement"'s best efforts.
engineers on the bottom don't care about the politics. they design and implement the best they can.