Boeing Chief Must Have Engineering Background, Emirates Boss Says (ft.com) 81
The chief of Emirates, one of Boeing's largest clients, has said the crisis-stricken US aircraft maker should ensure its new chief executive has engineering experience to restore safety standards (non-paywalled link). From a report: A day after Boeing chief executive Dave Calhoun announced he would step down, Sir Tim Clark also said he backed efforts by the US group's largest labour union to win a seat on the board. "To fix Boeing's issues the company needs a strong engineering lead as its head coupled to a governance model which prioritises safety and quality," Clark told the Financial Times on Tuesday.
"Some serious lateral thinking" was needed, the airline boss added. Boeing on Monday unveiled a wide-ranging reshuffle of its leadership in a bid to get to grips with an escalating reputational crisis after a 737 Max door panel blew off mid-flight in January. Calhoun, 66, is to leave at the end of the year, while board chair Larry Kellner said he would depart in May. Stan Deal, head of the commercial planes division since 2019, was immediately replaced by chief operating officer Stephanie Pope.
"Some serious lateral thinking" was needed, the airline boss added. Boeing on Monday unveiled a wide-ranging reshuffle of its leadership in a bid to get to grips with an escalating reputational crisis after a 737 Max door panel blew off mid-flight in January. Calhoun, 66, is to leave at the end of the year, while board chair Larry Kellner said he would depart in May. Stan Deal, head of the commercial planes division since 2019, was immediately replaced by chief operating officer Stephanie Pope.
Maybe (Score:5, Insightful)
The most important attribute is that they must like airplanes. Not making money, not even boeing. They have to love airplanes, avaiation, seeing people transported safely. They have to really get a kick out of that more than they get a kick out of making immmediate money. That has to be their number 1 drive.
Re: Maybe (Score:1)
Re:Maybe (Score:5, Interesting)
This is the answer. Leadership doesn't need an engineering background, they need a manufacturing background. Boeing needs to be a company whose mission is to build airplanes for profit. Not a company whose mission is solely to generate profit.
Jack Welch and his cult are the worst thing that ever happened to the USA.
Re:Maybe (Score:5, Insightful)
Finance majors focus on maximizing profit for the executives right now, regardless of any longer term damage to the company.
The company's long term health is not a concern.
The quality of the product is not a concern except as it aids in generating maximum profits now.
The company is merely a vehicle to generate maximum profit for its owners in the short term.
That is the attitude of many in leadership in corporate America.
Companies are allowed to exist in society because of the benefits they provide to the society.
Some companies are not allowed to exist (e.g. mafias) because of the costs they extract from society.
This country had a paradigm-shift in finance around the year 2000. It was right after Glass-Steagall was repealed, after several years (coinciding with the tech bubble) of deregulation of the banking system. It was right around then the education bubble started expanding, the housing bubble started expanding, the medical-costs bubble started expanding. These things have not been addressed because the new paradigm is so lucrative for the financial sector and asset holders.
These policies have been adopted globally. It will be interesting to see how they evolve in different societies.
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Finance majors focus on maximizing profit for the executives right now, regardless of any longer term damage to the company.
The company's long term health is not a concern.
The quality of the product is not a concern except as it aids in generating maximum profits now.
The company is merely a vehicle to generate maximum profit for its owners in the short term.
That is the attitude of many in leadership in corporate America.
Companies are allowed to exist in society because of the benefits they provide to the society.
Some companies are not allowed to exist (e.g. mafias) because of the costs they extract from society.
This country had a paradigm-shift in finance around the year 2000. It was right after Glass-Steagall was repealed, after several years (coinciding with the tech bubble) of deregulation of the banking system. It was right around then the education bubble started expanding, the housing bubble started expanding, the medical-costs bubble started expanding. These things have not been addressed because the new paradigm is so lucrative for the financial sector and asset holders.
These policies have been adopted globally. It will be interesting to see how they evolve in different societies.
Old Chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times.
New Chinese saying: "Hey, we'll help!"
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The quality of the product is not a concern except as it aids in generating maximum profits now.
Indeed. I'd even argue that making high quality products is detrimental to maximizing very short-term profits. I see three ways to make more money from your products - one, make products more expensive, two, reduce production expenses and three, sell more product. Raising prices is the most obvious way but risky because you may end up selling less product if people decide it's too expensive for them. Selling more of your product is not straightforward and requires a good understanding of the product, why pe
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Marketing, done correctly, includes understanding your product, your customers, and why they want your product.
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Also making your product worse sells more products, if your washing machine only needs replacing every 25 years then you only get to sell one every 25 years to that person, if it lasts 5 then more 5 times the sales. I have literally gone in the shop to ask which toaster is the best quality, and the shop assistant simply said I don't know, they are all the same people only buy on appearance.
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This country had a paradigm-shift in finance around the year 2000. It was right after Glass-Steagall was repealed, after several years (coinciding with the tech bubble) of deregulation of the banking system. It was right around then the education bubble started expanding, the housing bubble started expanding, the medical-costs bubble started expanding.
Kind of, but not exactly. The actual issue started in the 1950s when the boomers were being born. in the 80s, I saw a documentary talking about how over the past 30 years, laws had been passed to create an environment where this explosion of babies could be exploited. Medical, Financial, Funeral, etc were all planned ahead of time. Once the boomers are all dead, the plan will have been completed. But Reality keeps on going and the amount of babies is no longer exploding ... so we are left with rampant pover
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Intel is going through that process now, with their "Airbus" being AMD.
Back when Intel had the Pentium IV and were concentrating on the Itanium, AMD brought out a new - more energy efficient - generation with 64 bits. Intel then engaged in criminal practices to suppress AMD while catching and then overtaking AMD with processors which subsequently turned out to be vulnerable to Heartbleed. Then AMD reinvented themselves and brought out the Ryzen processors, Intel's response was to appoint a techie - Pat Ge
Re: Maybe (Score:1)
Heartbleed was an OpenSSL vulnerability.
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He means Spectre/Meltdown.
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That's what I was thinking too.
I've known engineers that were good at business, that were great at business, and that were absolutely terrible at business.
I've known business-types that were reasonably good at managing their departments/organizations, that were great at it, and that were terrible at it, very easily taken-in by suckups and the nature of workplace socialization.
And the problem is that it can be very difficult to know exactly how someone will behave in a role. It sounds like the legacy of the
Re:Maybe (Score:5, Interesting)
No, you don't want someone who *romanticizes* aviation. You want a hard-nosed realist who can think critically and has got his priorities straight.
In a crisis of trust, what you need is a leader with *character*. You need someone who understands the responsibility of building a product that people trust, but which can kill them. You need someone who can speak with discretion while at the same time being scrupulously honest about things people have a right to know.
Above all, you need a realist who is going focus on things that make an actual difference rather than just managing perceptions and evading blame. Saying the right thing has never been Boeing's management's problem, they always said exactly what needed to be said. They just never did what needed to be done.
I think the need for a leader with outstanding character is why people would like to see an engineer in charge. People trust engineers, otherwise they'd never get in a car or a plane. But we're not all ideal engineers, are we? Look at the CEO of OceanGate; he was an aeronautical engineer, but you sure as hell wouldn't want someone like him in charge of Boeing. A lack of enthusiasm for his vehicle wasn't what caused it to implode; it was a lack of sober and critical thinking.
Re:Maybe (Score:5, Insightful)
Basically, what I think you're saying is that you need a test engineer — someone who understands how things can go wrong and is cynical enough to assume that they will.
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A test engineer would be a good choice, but a better one would be a safety engineer [wikipedia.org], one who not only knows that things will fail but also who anticipates how they will fail and how the system (pilots and aircraft) will detect and react to the failure.
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A safety engineer isn't the right person for that task. The person for that role will take input from the safety engineer along with the rest, and needs to be smart enough to understand what's being said and to provide a path forward.
The project engineer and the safety engineer are at-loggerheads. It's the program manager's job to work with them to find a way forward.
Or, tangenitally (Score:1)
A nuclear scientist confident enough in his power plant to live on plant grounds with spouse and children is more desirable than someone who is gung ho on radioactive water heaters because it's kool.
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No, you don't want someone who *romanticizes* aviation. You want a hard-nosed realist who can think critically and has got his priorities straight.
You can love something without romanticizing it.
I think they need someone who does love aviation, for whom the idea of maximizing quarterly profit to the expense of planes hits an almost visceral reaction of disgust.
Boeing need to figure out how to build good planes and turn A profit, not build planes and maximize profit.
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I'm not saying it *can't* be someone who is enthusiastic about aviation, but there's the danger of what psychologists call "motivated thinking" -- you or I would call it "wishful thinking" or "denial". If someone really loves the product, you need him to be able to believe something he wish was not true.
That's actually a rare quality. If a close call by a referee goes against your team, I'd say at least 90% of people would automatically believe it was a bad call and could not be convinced otherwise.
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Furthermore, you need someone who can empower other people to push the big red STOP button when they see bad shit happening. If they continue to override and punish the guys on the line that ensure quality and safety, it won't matter how intelligent and scrupulous the people in the C-suite are.
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The problem is not the leader.
He hears that one of his plane types/models has problems in the news. BAD!
The problem is the middle tear management that does not have the guts to report problems they can not solve one or two levels higher. Yeah? The worker in the assembly line reports a problem, an engineer reports a problem, the manager thinks: "hm, is that important or not?" and then forgets it.
The fact that there is a problem, never reaches anyone who can judge how server it is, or anyone who could solve i
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Those people don't tend to be very good for this quarter's stock price, so it can be difficult to get a board of directors to consider them.
Re: Maybe (Score:2)
Iâ(TM)ve been reading this site since 2000 or so. This is the best comment I have ever read. Bravo.
Re: Maybe (Score:1)
The problem is that Boeing is basically an extension of the government at this point so for it to survive it really needs a bureaucrat that knows how to grease the hands of other bureaucrats.
Boeing as an entity should have its government support retracted and fail.
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The most important attribute is that they must like airplanes...have to love airplanes, avaiation, seeing people transported safely.
Perhaps, in addition, they should have a background in aerospace engineering and possibly risk management. They have put a few accountants in charge, but I really don't think that accountants can have the in depth understanding of aerospace engineering to really understand aircraft safety.
Dave Calhoun - Accountant
New COO - Stephanie Pope - Accountant
Dennis Muilenburg - Aerospace Engineer
James McNerney - MBA (Harvard)
Harry Stonecipher - BS Physics
Philip Condit - Mechanical Engineer
(1997 Merger with McDonald
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You'll find that describes many engineers - aviation is a true engineering feat of humanity. And like engineers, it involves a whole bunch of compromises to be made, something engineers are traditionally
As The Economist once said (Score:3, Funny)
Usiness Chool ? (Score:5, Funny)
Usiness Chool ?
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Finally (Score:2)
Turning the tide against MBAs without experience (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe this would be the beginning of the turning of the tide against MBAs without any frontline experience? One could hope.
Would you put any weight on a general who had never been to the frontline, never held a gun, never been on any operation? No, then why do so many business hire MBAs with no frontline experience in the industry into management? IT management who never written a line of code, etc. It is an insanity that should be stopped.
Re: Turning the tide against MBAs without experien (Score:3)
You misunderstand the board, executive, and institutional shareholder objectives. All of which are short to mid term financial objectives, and not always even gain. Tax laws are byzantine, and favor the very wealthy. For example, if you sell a stock with 12 months of purchase, you donâ(TM)t report earnings. Big losses can create even bigger gains in other ways. You can offload immense debt on one company, you can outsource the gains, all kinds of fun tricks. And these tricks are what mbaâ(TM)s kno
Re: Turning the tide against MBAs without experien (Score:5, Interesting)
That remonds me of a short chat i had with the CEO of a fairly large family owned company.
He said that they too like quarter to querter with plans and results, but with a "minor" difference: They talk about a quarter of a century..
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Oh it's much worse than that. There's soooo much brain damage done by an MBA degree, I now consider it a Pre-existing Condition.
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Frontline experience isn't the quality you're looking for. It's character, it's pragmatism, and it's excellent planning combined with a relentless focus on what matters most for the job at hand. Frontline experience doesn't give you that, otherwise we would have Patton in charge of the ETOS in WW2 and that would have been a disaster.
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Maybe this would be the beginning of the turning of the tide against MBAs without any frontline experience? One could hope.
,/quote>
Maybe in the aircraft industry. It's too entrenched in for-profit companies now to ever be rooted out without a full-blown world-shifting disaster.
Would you put any weight on a general who had never been to the frontline, never held a gun, never been on any operation? No, then why do so many business hire MBAs with no frontline experience in the industry into management? IT management who never written a line of code, etc. It is an insanity that should be stopped.
What needs to be stopped is the MBA driven "record profits every quarter forever and ever amen" nonsense. Healthy businesses make profit. Long-term healthy businesses keep a realistic perspective that there will be moments of "somewhat less profit" and that such a single quarter is not a direct sign outright that the entire management team needs shuffled away in favor of profit seekers. That could, maybe, with an exorcist and a rebuild of the entire MBA process, be trained properly into MBAs, but right now it's considered insanity to say you can't have record profits every quarter. That mentality needs to die, but I don't see how you do it in our current world barring every individual company going through something as brazenly stupid as Boeing's current woes.
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You're not fooling me with that 737-MAX (Score:1, Redundant)
If it's Boeing, I ain't going.
If it's Boeing, it is plunging. (Score:2)
If it's Boeing, it is plunging.
True for the Stock, and for the planes.
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Engineering is only part of it (Score:3)
Right now, Boeing's problem is QA/QC. What they need is a CEO with *SOME* engineering experience but who has a specialty focus and whose primary experience is with ISO/TC184/SC4 and maintaining quality standards, and production speed be damned. You can be an engineer all day long and still fail as a CEO because you don't understand the standards and regulations applicable to your industry. If the new CEO does not understand the QC side of things, it won't matter if they're an engineer, this fiasco will repeat itself.
Re:Engineering is only part of it (Score:5, Informative)
Right now, Boeing's problem is QA/QC.
Right now, Boeing's problem is cultural. The MBA's and CFO's and accountants run the show, and they have created a "we're the shakers and movers - get the gadammed plan out the door NOW! The Max is a textbook case of non-engineers in total control, with contempt for engineers running the show, and don't you engineers forget it.
Yo are correct about the schedule be damned part being needed.
It isn't a digital thing where an engineer can't figure out QC or manage. The can, and they have i the past. But that isn't what happened at Boeing. They had management that knew nothing about planes, but held the plane design and construction process in contempt. They were the masters, they made the technical decisions because they were smarter than everyone else.
That's a terrible culture to have in life critical technology.
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That is mostly a myth. Looking back at the line of CEOs till Stonecipher, only one was a Harvard type. The rest were scientists and aerospace engineers.
I find it hard to digest that the scientists and aerospace engineers created the MBA/CFO culture.
I've worked in groups of each. Scientists, engineers, and Accountant/MBA types all lead differently. Perhaps Boeing is the exception, but they would seem to have the latter culture.
Boeing, for its part, was once the big house on the hill company. They produced a lot of iconic planes In the Jet age, the 707 and 727, then the revered 737 line, now dirtied by what's actually an imposter. And then there is
Re:Engineering is only part of it (Score:5, Insightful)
Right now, Boeing's problem is QA/QC. What they need is a CEO with *SOME* engineering experience but who has a specialty focus and whose primary experience is with ISO/TC184/SC4 and maintaining quality standards, and production speed be damned.....
The problems cut across the board. In aerospace engineering and manufacturing, institutional knowledge is key. The reason airplanes don't crash isn't because of better engineering analysis. It's because we get smarter over time, and ideally if you have younger engineers sitting next to guys and gals who designed the last few generations of aircraft. Same goes for manufacturing and quality control. Ideally the guys running the factory worked on the previous generations, and you know what needs to be done, and why it needs to be done. In Boeing's case, they replaced many of their career employees with contract- workers to save a few $$. But when you do that, you lose all the institutional knowledge and stupid decisions are made, or are not properly vetted. The problem for Boeing is that once the institutional knowledge is gone, it takes many years and lots of hard work to get back, if ever. A start would be that Boeing invests in their workers, both in terms of training and also in retention, while reducing the dependency on contract-labor. Then maybe in 10 or 20 years, Boeing might have a chance to regain its lost prestige. But unless Boeing gets serious about being a career destination of choice, I don't see this happening.
Re: Engineering is only part of it (Score:1)
The problem is that Boeing has all the safety and process certifications and people that know their way around the bureaucracy. Those things are the problem.
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No, their problem is taking shortcuts to make metrics look good. At all levels. Boeing has a lot of pressure on them (self imposed?) to produce aircraft at a very high rate. The deliveries have been an intense focus since the 787, and the 737 has felt this doubly so. Tremendous effort was put into maximizing manufacturing throughput, which was truly an engineering feat.
It is just hard to keep that going... which leads to the shortcuts.
They need another Alan Mullaly.
Toyota (Score:2)
WHAT?! NOT A USELESS MBA? (Score:2)
I'm shocked! SHOCKED I TELL YOU at the prospect of an engineer running a company that makes product the requires engineering to create.
You need only look at a particular interview with Steve Jobs to understand this. He said that at one point Apple hired a bunch of MBAs to run things and it didn't work at all because they didn't know how to do anything. This also speaks to the reality that once a company loses sight of what made them a great company in the first place, they're effed. Churning out the same
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MBAs don't understand taking risks. They want to minimize risk.
This comment flies in the face of the current saga
These MBA's took excessive risk in favour of immediate, short-term, reward.
I'm confused. What, exactly, is your point here?
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In a general sense, they risked the company's future by laying off experienced engineers, outsourcing, and isolating management. But they still entertained the proposals to move forward instead of tweaking the existing planes again. Then
The Boeing CEO ... (Score:2)
I knew it was going to be bad when Deal didn't show up on the news front and center immediately after the door incident. Calhoun did. Problem is that his only job is ke
Boeing needs a fierce aviationist (Score:2)
Engineering isn't enough. Boeing needs someone of the classic US aviationist mold to bring in a cadre and ruthlessly crush and purge all who resist (because passive resistance is deadly).
More people with military aviation backgrounds would not hurt because pilots understand in a visceral way whats at stake.
Wrong background (Score:1)
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Why not someone with an aviation safety background? I work with people who do that for a living. One was formerly a systems engineer, the other has been safety for most of his career. If you can find a Designated Engineering Representative with the right mindset to be an executive, that would probably check all of your boxes.
I don't think the selection needs to be quite that narrow, but the CEO and a majority of the CEO's deputies should come from backgrounds of designing or building aircraft rather than
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good luck with that (Score:2)
Alan Mulally is probably the only one that could right things, unfortunately he is 78.
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My thinking too. Someone wicked smart, humble, and focused... that can communicate. Shame he got pushed out in the first place.
Troll, had to (Score:2)
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Here, we just "off" them in the parking lot.
Calhoun... (Score:2)
"... to restore safety standards" (Score:5, Insightful)
I would think that Boeing would be sued to radioactive rubble if safety is not their first, second and third priority. At least they should be.
Safety Systems (Score:4, Insightful)
Too Simplistic - Boeing *was* Led by an Engineer (Score:5, Informative)
Dennis Muilenburg has a bachelor's in Aerospace Engineering and a master's in Aeronautics and Astronautics. He held both management and engineering positions at Boeing before becoming president and CEO from 2015-2019.
Dennis Muilenburg also oversaw the 737 MAX/MCAS fiasco.
It's not a guarantee (Score:3)
To whit: the people that overruled the engineers at Morton-Thiokol, and allowed Challenger to launch in the cold, were managers that used to be engineers. The general manager of Thiokol leaned on his senior managers, including the one who brought the "no launch" recommendation, to "Take off your engineering hat [science.org], and put on your management hat [nasaspaceflight.com]". They OK'ed the launch, and the Shuttle exploded.
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If Boeing has an engineering-focused
Another promoted COO (Score:1)
On the surface, it makes sense to focus on operations, and the COO is often groomed as a CEO's successor. Sadly, history has shown that the quickest way to stagnate a corporation is to put your COO in charge when the visionary CEO leaves. I.E., Microsoft/Balmer, Apple/Cook, and many more.
Much has been made of the change in focus from engineering to finance
invested into the company (Score:2)
This should be universal (Score:2)
Aircraft builders should be led by people who know about building aeroplanes.
Car manufacturers should be led by people who know about building cars.
Medical organisations should be led by people from healthcare.
The only one of these that happens is financial organisations are led by people who like taking money off other people.
This would explain why the only companies that do well are ones that are dedicated to taking money from people and giving it to rich people.
Here, here (Score:1)
And anyone left over from the McDonnellDouglas merger should be shown the door. And move headquarters back to the West Coast
Richard Feynman said it best (Score:2)
Who builds airplanes? (Score:1)