America - The Official Thread
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Back in the day, my job involved a lot of air travel. I remember the warm and comfortable feeling I got as I boarded a plane made by Boeing.
These days they can't seem to get much right, having focused on the short term stock price rather than the quality of their products.
How things have changed for this American company which used to blow the doors off the rest of them.
arstechnica.com
These days they can't seem to get much right, having focused on the short term stock price rather than the quality of their products.
How things have changed for this American company which used to blow the doors off the rest of them.
The surprise is not that Boeing lost commercial crew but that it finished at all
"The structural inefficiency was a huge deal."
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- Grea'er Laandan
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Ouch. I hope this wasn't intended as a macabre pun?
Alaska Airlines grounds 737 Max 9 planes after section blows out mid-air
Part of the fuselage of the Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 Max 9 fell off, forcing an emergency landing.
www.bbc.co.uk
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- 19,455
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I just try not to think of these things by scrolling about the electronic myriads, frittering away personal data vested by the vapors of long-forgotten moments, and continuous to do so into our collective forgetfulness, while on my way to instructing people on the best methods of writing up automobile safety recalls. To slip the surly bonds of earth and trade them for the public stocks is the unfortunate trade-off.
Mmmm....clouds.
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- 13,754
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- Neomone
I think realistically Boeing died when it merged with McDonnell Douglas. They kept the name that had the superior brand goodwill, but in retrospect the combined company seems to be much more the descendant of MDD than of Boeing.Back in the day, my job involved a lot of air travel. I remember the warm and comfortable feeling I got as I boarded a plane made by Boeing.
These days they can't seem to get much right, having focused on the short term stock price rather than the quality of their products.
How things have changed for this American company which used to blow the doors off the rest of them.
The surprise is not that Boeing lost commercial crew but that it finished at all
"The structural inefficiency was a huge deal."
The power of branding and advertising, I guess.
Danoff
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Boeing has 170,000 employees... or something along those lines. Humanity is not good at managing that many people. It's why people moan about how inefficient government is (or at least part of the reason), because government has a lot of people to manage. When companies get this big, they don't do well.
Startups are hard because nothing is efficient. Then your company gets big enough that you get efficiencies and you hit a sweet spot, and then you get too big thinking that same recipe will just keep working.
What some companies try to do when they get oversized is to "divest", which is an ugly process something like a divorce, and it doesn't work well. Maybe it's something like a star. You can't really shine until you get enough mass, but if you get too much mass you turn into a black hole and stop shining again.
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Eh, I worked for a company that was spun off the larger mothership, but kept a good deal of its own identity and the break worked mostly seamlessly. Probably because both parties were keen on making their own decisions, retained their own orbit of management which had very little overlap with each other, besides having the same CEO.
Honestly, some consultants really ought to interview the lot of them directly involved in the process because it went amazingly well (though it's been a hot decade since the gears all went in motion). If the biggest problems were brand awareness, temporary financial belt-tightening, and having to call up insurance companies on Day One that there's a new employer on the card numbers, that's easy-peasy. The first one took care of itself since it already had a large market share, and the second one culled away a few thieves.
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Danoff
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From my experience it is almost unworkable. But that experience is mostly involved with a company that does a lot of integrated R&D. The cross-use of technical components, IP, branding, manufacturing, etc. makes divestiture extremely difficult. Basically if you're getting the benefits of being a big company i.e. efficiency via shared resources, you have to pull apart those resources and break those efficiencies when you separate.
Corporate management likes to think the other way though. They figure it's more efficient to merge, and somehow simultaneously think that it's more efficient to split.
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My sympathy for such companies is limited. If you can't do your job properly, then maybe it's time to slow down and figure that out instead of continuing to push for expansion and growth. But no, stockholders are the priority and line must go up, no matter what.
It's hard to run a very large company, but it's not impossible if your intention is to make a good product and serve your customers well. It requires an appropriate structure, clear goals, and a culture that allows people to point out problems and fix them.
If your intention is simply to make as much money as possible in as short a time as possible before the whole house of cards collapses then you get stuff like modern Boeing, which is arguably working exactly as intended. When you incentivise cutting every corner to make a buck, you can't be surprised when corners keep getting cut at the expense of everything that isn't profit. That's the system you've created.
It's why relying on pure profit as a corporate motivator is dangerous. In many industries there's a lag between making a profit and seeing any consequences for the actions you took to make that profit that is very, very exploitable.
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The legislation is personal for Rehder, who was married at age 15 to her 21-year-old boyfriend in 1984. A year earlier, her sister, at age 16, married her 39-year-old drug dealer, she has said.
I'm sorry, what? So their parents saw the 16 year old sister wanting to marry a 39 year old drug dealer and thought "yep, this seems legit, good to go" and gave their consent?
I feel like the local child protection agency should have been able to have a field day with that one. Certainly someone should probably have twigged that something was up with the family in the year before the little sister did the Diet Cola version of the same thing. I've got nothing against a later age for being married, teenagers can sexually disappoint each other just fine without rings on. But I feel like that wasn't exactly the thing that failed here...
Danoff
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I'm not sympathizing or advocating, I'm just explaining what's happening. You had blamed the McDonnel Douglas merger for Boeing's downfall, and to an extent I was agreeing with you. John Oliver complained about the culture at MDD winning out vs the culture of Boeing, but the corporate culture at MDD is what happens when you get big, so it was somewhat inevitable that after a huge merger like that Boeing's culture deteriorated.
It's not a matter of "if you can't do your job properly", so much as it is that corporations twist on themselves when they've reached a certain size. They're not going to stop and ask themselves whether they can do their job properly because their job shifts to being about, as you said, pumping up stock numbers. And the stock price is not based on good business practices in any way. It's not based on anything rational that actually helps corporations at all, it's based on the collective whims of millions of people, the headlines they read, and their bad sense about whether a particular corporate move is a good one.
As far as I'm aware, there are no good solutions for this problem. It is a problem though. Further, as the companies become black holes, they start sucking up good companies that are a good size and are doing good work in hopes of getting some kind of development and progress, and this is ultimately a bad move from a consumer standpoint.
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Danoff
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I'd like to hear your example of a large corporation that nails this, from any time period.
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Danoff
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Interesting example. During the 15 year stretch between 1955 and 1970, IBM multiplies its number of employees by a factor of 5, going from 56k employees to 269k employees (according to Wikipedia). In just the 5 year stretch between '55 and '60 the employee figures double from 56k to 104k. So this was a company that was rapidly expanding during this time. A period of rapid expansion is not a particularly difficult one for a company. They were a computing company on the absolute brink of an explosion of computing. I'm not too surprised to hear that they weathered an economic downturn well or that they were a good place to work during that time period.
They kept the same leadership through that entire period, which probably had something to do with avoiding the bloated mindset. It didn't last forever though.
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You make it sound like it's inevitable for any company over a certain size though, and I don't agree with that. That may well be functionally the case with the way that financial systems are structured in the US and in similar countries, although I sort of hope not because that would be a massive problem.
But I don't think it's inevitable for any large company in a general sense. I think it's possible to have a large company that works, it's just not possible when you run it the way that modern large companies are run. Or at least, I think that there's a bunch of ways of running large companies that haven't gotten a fair shake because they're not profit optimal, and until those get a decent go I'm not willing to rule out the possibility that one of them could make it work.
Valve/Steam?
Valve as a company is a massive aberration in terms of modern corporate culture, but as far as I can tell in most areas they're viewed pretty favourably. The one consistent negative I'm aware of is that they charge developers a relatively large cut of sales to use their service, but their service is also head and shoulders above any of the cheaper options both in functionality and reach so it doesn't seem like it's priced unfairly.
They don't have stockholders to kowtow to.
Their corporate culture is famously flat and flexible. It has had and still has issues with it, but Valve is aware and it appears to be something they continue to work on.
They spin off into adjacent fields every so often (Steam Controller, Valve Index, Steam Deck, etc.), but even when they flop they don't seem to have overextended to the point that it disrupts their core business.
As a platform, it seems pretty well liked by it's users as far as those things go. People whinge on the internet, but the Epic Store and the proliferation of publisher specific launchers has shown how much worse it could be. The refund model in particular seems to have become something that elevates them above most e-stores.
Not all companies could or should run exactly like Valve, but I think there's a lot to be learned from the mindset behind it. There's a danger when pointing to companies like this that you get what happened with Toyota and Just In Time/5S - those were specific policies introduced to improve specific things about Toyota's business. A lot of companies then just tried to copy JIT/5S cargo cult style, instead of adopting the methods of observation and reflection that led to adopting appropriate solutions.
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Valve is an interesting one because people generally loathe or begrudingly tolerate DRM, especially with the drift towards GaaS gathering momentum, but Valve is nowhwere near the worst despite being a globally renowned industry leader.
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They have over $10 billion in annual revenue. Depends what measures of size you think are impactful on the management of a company.
It wouldn't surprise me if there aren't that many companies in the world that have more than 100k employees. About 250 if you believe this website.
Keef
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No, McDonald Douglas's culture is what happens when you're a **** company desperate for a takeover.
McDonald Douglas built most of its business on government contracts which are rife with corruption to this day. Those contracts were the comany's lifeline. It was consistently terrible at producing competitive civilian airplanes - the MD-10 and -11 are only used as cargo planes today for a reason, because they aren't good for anything else, and despite that they were still quirky planes that required special training to land. In fact there are design regulations inspired by those planes due to landing accidents caused by their cockpit position relative to the plane's CG. 386 of them were built and so far 32 have had total-loss accidents with 1,300 deaths. That ain't good.
Modern Boeing has been making the exact same profit-driven decisions that MD did back in the day and we're seeing the results. Aviation absolutely must have safety and excellence as the number 1 factor in all decision making. Profit cannot be considered, like, at all. It's not even on the list in my opinion. You do what's right, and then you figure out how to make money after the right decisions have been made. Free market shortcuts cannot be taken. There's a reason the free market doesn't exist in aviation, it's thoroughly governed by the FAA, every little detail. Somehow, Boeing managed to get their grubby hands in the FAA to screw up that system as well.
I find it pretty funny how much business Boeing has pushed directly into Airbus's hands. The biggest screw up so far was the Airbus A220. Bombardier developed that plane, another company that made good machines but struggled financially and had various problems with support after sales due to poor growth and supply lines. Yet they developed the C-Series, a great plane, and Boeing hated it so much they teamed up with the US government to shut the program down. They accused Bombardier of dumping the C-Series in the US market (their biggest buyer was Delta), the US government agreed, and the two basically forced Bombardier to sell off the program. Who did they sell it to? Airbus. Now they're selling like hotcakes, and Delta is operating more Airbuses than Boeings, with plenty of orders on the way, and zero Boeings ordered (the MAX 10 isn't gonna happen).
Speaking of the 737, what a terrible decision to keep kicking that can down the road. The only reason they did it is because Southwest Airlines operated 737s exclusively. The idea was to streamline overheard, from pilot training to maintenance. Modern prices for pilot type ratings are hovering around $80,000 per pilot, and every single one of them needs the type. All of Southwest's pilots have the same type. The FAA allows variants to keep the same type rating with added differences training but only if the airframe and system are highly similar (oddly, the 767 and 757 share a type rating because their cockpits and systems are extremely similar but there was probably some FAA favoritism going on as well). Anyway, Southwest and Boeing were tightknit and Southwest didn't want to have to break their cost-saving systems, so Boeing kept pushing the 737 airframe forward rather than developing a new one that was more competitive with Airbus. Southwest is the only reason the 737 still exists today. And look what has happened, as Boeing has struggled to improve the airframe which was a short-sighted design to begin with, they've forced Southwest to consider buying from Airbus and diversify their fleet since Boeing simply can't be trusted to deliver the necessary orders.
The company is in shambles. They have nothing to compete with the A220 which they handed to Airbus on a silver platter. They 737 is highly limited structurally and should've been replaced by a new airframe 15+ years ago. The plane might be effective currently, but it can't get any more efficient since bigger engines won't fit, and the efforts they've already taken to fit bigger engines has resulted in the current fiasco. At minimum they need to be developing two completely new airframes concurrently and they needed to start over a decade ago. They're losing their ass, the company is on the brink and a total embarrassment to the industry and us pilots. In the next ten years, you should fully expect Airbus to dominate the civilian market. Speaking of which, I haven't even mentioned all of Boeing's air force screw ups. The AF is pissed at Boeing, completely unable to deliver vital national defence airframes. Most of our fleet of refuelers is due to be retired, like, now, and the KC-46 still isn't mission ready as of yet.
Boeing can burn to the ground for all I care. They've disrespected every pilot in America and many around the world in a way that is going to take decades to repair.
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