Who Do You Really Work For?
I’m a bit of a documentary nut. I don’t watch reality tv or game shows. I might watch Big Bang reruns, but given the choice I’m watching How It’s Made or a documentary on the history of the continents or technology or whatever. History. Science. Engineering.
So one of those rare nights came up when my wife declared there to be nothing on tv, and she handed over the remote. I landed on a two year old documentary on Boeing. Just as a frame of reference, in case you’re not a news hound, this came from 2022, the period after the Indonesian and Ethiopian 737 Max crashes, but before the doors coming off the jet or the embarrassment with the Boeing astronauts stranded on the ISS.
This is a Netflix documentary . https://qr.netflix.com/title/81272421 It’s an hour and a half long, so it’s a bit of a commitment. It’s worth the time mainly to understand the difference between success and failure of the management of a company producing engineered products. This is a space that most people reading this blog are either in or adjacent to in one way or another. I think what the documentary shows is the beginning of the end for a company as big and respected as Boeing, and how it can go from being a top shelf brand to an industry byword in a few short years. The story can stand as a lesson to us all.
And I’m sure that each of us can find a parallel that hits close to home. In the case of Boeing, hundreds of people have lost their lives, and most of us aren’t dealing with consequences that extreme, but I’m willing to bet that the feeling of dedicating your career to a company that doesn’t seem to value your contribution is very familiar.
After WWII Boeing was a household name synonymous with the best engineering and manufacturing the US could provide. Most of us grew up in that era and with that perception.
This stellar reputation was the consequence of putting a high value on product quality. In short, it matters if design, manufacturing and assembly are done correctly. The end result matters.
The turning point came when Boeing merged with McDonnell Douglas. After the merge, the headquarters was moved to a different city to get management away from engineers and technical people. The goals were now financial rather than product oriented. The company was being run by MBAs and Wall Street rather than people who understood what it takes to build air planes that people wanted to fly on. Eventually Airbus started to surpass Boeing in sales and in reputation.
After this documentary initially aired on Netflix in 2022 the doors quite literally came off. In March 2024 a door blew out of a 737Max in flight because of improper bolt installation. All of the assurances from management suddenly start ringing hollow, and people start flashing back a few years to the two planes crashing due to a safety system.
Further, since that event, the Boeing Starliner had a couple of failures after it docked to the ISS, and the two astronauts it took up had to come back on a Space X Dragon. This was another level of black eye that Boeing could hardly afford after the rest of these back-to-back failures.
And then to add further insult to injury, Boeing workers voted to strike, which is on-going as of this writing. How much of this can the company withstand? The financial goals were short sighted because they short circuited product quality and final safety. The company sells an engineered technical product. MBAs don’t understand or value the engineering, manufacturing, quality process or engineers, so to wrest control of the company, they try to separate the engineers from the decision making. Boeing isn’t the only place where this has happened, but it’s the one that makes the news.
Yes, finance is an important part of any business. If you ignore finance, the company isn’t going to last long. Companies exist to fill a need for products and services, but also to turn an investment into profit. I get that. But in the end, the products you make must do what they are designed to do and be safe. Boeing is on the skids, and it’s not because they are profitable, it’s because the profitability came at the price of quality, design integrity and in the end public safety. That clearly reflects corporate priorities that are out of whack. You can’t stop being human just because you wear a corporate name tag.
Further, as an employee, working for a company driven by investors is wholly unpleasant. The lifeblood gets squeezed out of everything, most notably employees. Do more with less. Efficiency is certainly important, but efficiency is always a ratio which is driven by multiple factors. You can’t let a single factor drive the whole business. You can’t have employees without treating them well. You can’t have a product without a good design. You can’t have customers without delivering on their requirements. And you can’t do anything if your products jeopardize public safety.
There is a scene in the documentary where one worker tells another that the last shift didn’t put a shim in where it was supposed to be. Management comes back and says they can’t put it in now because they are already over time. The employee stands there with his mouth hanging open in disbelief. The implication was that the plane went out without the parts as it was properly designed. We know from news reports that things like this actually happened, and this was not a dramatization.
The initial problem with the two 737 Max crashes turned out to be that a safety system was added to the plane. Internal memos showed that Boeing decided to remove the new system from the documentation because then regulators would insist that they had to train pilots on how to use it. Extra training would cost extra money and in the end would have cost the company the sale of hundreds of aircraft. So there was an automatic system on board that would take control of the plane, but the pilots didn’t know how to use it. This was the direct cause of two relatively new and fully loaded passenger jets crashing at full speed shortly after take off. It was all because of money.
And speaking of money, the CEO resigned and was given $62 million. Boeing was fined less than $500 million, after the families of the dead had asked for $25 billion. No one at Boeing was charged with any crimes. 346 people dead, and the CEO gets rewarded with $62 million.
We all have stories where we have not been allowed to really do our best work because of time limitations. My best experiences have been in working for companies with identifiable owners or where there was some sort of employee ownership. These companies work at a human scale and have a human conscience. My worst work experiences have been for publicly owned companies (companies with stocks traded on a public market). These companies have grown beyond the human scale, and especially when separated by the distance of a financial market, it is far too easy to lose track of real human scale decisions and integrity.
I followed this documentary up by watching a 2020 film on Lance Armstrong, and a lot of political footage. If someone, no matter how forcefully, tells you something that’s just not believable, it’s probably not. This applies double in the world of business. Take an MBA course and see how frequently the official position by design is to simply deny bad news. Regardless of what it is, regardless of how bad lying about even simple things makes you look. Don’t say “none of your business”, but instead just deny. Be careful about who you trust.
I never understood why DEI became a policy. Actually, I never understood DEI at all. I thought, ideally, things should be based on merit.
Just to be clear, I am Taiwanese but I grew up in Canada. I left Canada about 20 years ago for Japan and then back to Taiwan. I remember growing up in Canada in the 90’s, the idea of meritocracy was drilled into us.
Even though I live in Taiwan, now, most of the media I consume still comes from North America. I cannot believe what is happening in North America. People are being categorized in every which way. Back when I was young, it was just “be respectful to other people”; none of these pronoun or race-based ideology.
Then, it evolved into DEI. Why would you put someone in a position based on gender or ethnicity?! It should be based on whether the person can do the job properly or not. This is just insane.
Sorry to sound emotional. I still feel connected to Canada and North America in general. It is just so maddening to see my childhood home degenerate into this.
Adama, I think most people agree with you, even if they’re afraid to say so. People are people. DEI just looks like a different way to put people down based on criteria that doesn’t or shouldn’t matter. Anyway, I think the tide is turning on that. Some organizations seem to be reversing policies. This isn’t a political or social blog, but where the topic intersects this particular blog topic, it’s relevant.
Another article on Boeing failures shows up today:
https://gizmodo.com/boeing-may-sell-starliner-after-fumbling-its-first-crewed-flight-to-space-2000517505
Unfortunately for many large companies, they don’t have a good pool of talent to hire… so instead they hire based on DEI.
So, like many “large” Companies over the past decade, Boeing hired mostly young engineers to satisfy their DEI policies. We even saw that with Siemens… I actually got reprimanded by Siemens for pointing that out only a few years ago for saying as much here on this site and was asked to remove my post.
But I think Boeings problems as well as many other big companies is not so much hiring for diversity, but the pool of well-educated engineers has been gutted by DEI.
Here’s Boeings 2022 updated “incentive Plan” for hiring DEI
https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/01/de-i-compensation-committee-set-74708870.jpg
The DEI problems of today all started back in the High Schools, Colleges, and Universities 10+ year ago, when Academics and Educators decided they could remake students to have passion for any STEM degree. Great in theory, but they had to dumb down the curriculum in order to keep those students in their seats paying $50K+ a year tuition… and they even hired more DEI teachers to help with the influx of students and to be an inspiration to these fledging Engineers…. but like the old saying goes, if you “can’t do, teach”
Now don’t get me wrong I have nothing against diversity, it’s the “E & I” that’s the problem when it comes to engineering. My daughter has her ME degree from RPI Rensselaer, and she’ll be the first one to tell you how coddled she was and how few of her professors had any real-world Experience or even tried to. She has always said that I had taught her more about Engineering than anything she got from school. Which as a parent who forked out over $200K for her tuition was not exactly what I wanted to hear.
Design and Engineering is a profession that requires passion… it’s not for those who think it’s just about downloading a STL file of Yoda from the internet, then printing it on your $400 3D printer… but in 3 different colors, of course.
We’ve educated children to think replicating things on a 3D printer is a career path. It’s like in the 70’s if you told kids that by using a XEROX machine to copy your homework could get you a job in the “copy room” someday at Boeing.
Well, I could go on, but you get my point… this isn’t necessarily a Boeing problem, since the world is suffering the same issues. It’s only that Boeing makes products that have to work 100% of the time, so they need to go back to hiring the “best and brightest” and not by some Academic standard of just “checking boxes” to satisfy some emotional goal.
The Boeing doc is interesting. They are still prioritizing financial over technical performance 3:1 by their own accounting, although this document was from early 2022. Also interesting that the “climate & DEI” stuff is lumped in with technical performance. The trend with other companies in the last year has been to de-emphasize DEI in favor of just hiring the best people.
And here’s another article that shows how Dept of Justice is using DEI to impede oversight of Boeing going forward: https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/24/business/boeing-deal-dei-justice-department/index.html?iid=cnn_buildContentRecirc_end_recirc Even if Boeing was negligent, the government wants to employ the same ideology to oversee Boeing that got Boeing into trouble in the first place.
It’s sad to see the demise of a company like Boeing. It might not be long until they are bought out and/or split up. A cautionary tale to keep what’s important in focus.
From the documentary, maybe the most infuriating aspect of it was that the CEO that presided over the MCAS system fiasco and resulting commercial plane crashes got a $62,000,000 bonus upon resignation. What a slap in the face to employees, customers and especially families of the dead.