I've started to bring up Admiral Rickover's speech Doing a Job in all of the Boeing threads because he is just so relevant. Admiral Rickover was the man responsible for America having nuclear submarines. https://govleaders.org/rickover.htm
The speech is well worth a read in its entirety and it feels prescient in regards to Boeing. I think this paragraph more than any other hits at the core problem at Boeing:
> Unless the individual truly responsible can be identified when something goes wrong, no one has really been responsible. With the advent of modern management theories it is becoming common for organizations to deal with problems in a collective manner, by dividing programs into subprograms, with no one left responsible for the entire effort. There is also the tendency to establish more and more levels of management, on the theory that this gives better control. These are but different forms of shared responsibility, which easily lead to no one being responsible—a problems that often inheres in large corporations as well as in the Defense Department.
To contrast here is a statement from Calhoun: “We caused the problem. And we understand that. Over these last few weeks, I've had tough conversations with our customers, with our regulators, congressional leaders, and more. We understand why they are angry, and we will work to earn their confidence,” Calhoun said.
That we is him failing to take personal responsibility and choosing instead to spread responsibility to all employees, making no one responsible for the state of Boeing.
Boeing needs a leader who will take personal responsibility.
Unfortunately, the type of people who take personal responsibility for failures in organizations don’t end up climbing corporate ladders high enough to be considered for CEO positions. That’s just how large human groups work where contributions of each individual cannot be directly observed by everybody. Storytelling and making oneself look better start playing bigger role for promotions than actual results. Jeffrey Pfeffer writes in depth about it in his books about power.
I have been feeling cynical about the "blameless" culture seeping into entire organizations recently. At the end of some quarters where my team has fallen behind, I run away from the question of "who was really at fault here?". I probably should not do that...
The blameless postmortem comes from air crash investigation, where it works extremely well.
If people know there is a risk of blame, it changes their behavior. It creates incentives to destroy evidence, or avoid creating it in the first place. It creates incentives to stay inside your organizational and political boundaries rather than reach out to solve problems. Whereas if you have a successful blameless culture it is much easier to find out what actually happened.
To me, "blameless organisation" is about raising the bar for blaming people. It makes you try _really hard_ to blame the process that allowed this to happen: if you really can't... _Then_ we're within the realm of professional negligence/misconduct or performance
Blameless culture doesn't mean "we seek to not understand who was involved or played a part in the bad outcome", but rather "we seek to not punish them for their involvement, while seeking to understand who, what, why, when, and how in order that we can design a more robust overall system".
Blameless culture is not about dodging responsibility. It’s about that when a process wrongly allowed a human to do X, the process is the issue to fix.
Of course you can go deeper and ask why was this process not done correctly etc but at the end of the day, it’s about actionable changes that ensure mistakes don’t get repeated.
Perhaps you haven't worked enough in a habitually blaming organization. The problem is that blaming is both easy and often spurious. So in the end you still often run into the same problem: a bunch of people pointing fingers at each other and no one owning anything. If anyone takes a fall because of it that's often more a measure of their political power rather than their actual culpability. It also fails to address dysfunctional organizational processes that make individual errors more likely, because everyone is more concerned with finding a single scapegoat or small group of them.
Maybe we need a new way of expressing "blameless" that still expresses that personal responsibilty for quality work should be expected, but that punitive blame politics are simply a very ineffective way of encouraging that or finding the truth when problems inevitably occur.
The blameless culture is about the benefits of not blaming the reports I think. If you manage a team you should see yourself at fault in a sense if something goes wrong just by implication. But you should try not to make it a big deal for respective team member and your higher-ups should try the same for you...
Making it clear who did it does not mean firing that person or making them feel like shit internally, it's a learning process, but the higher up you go the more you should feel bad (presumably you went through the learning process and earning big bucks as a result, so wtf)
Same here, never understood the march towards 'blameless' culture - if someone is to blame, they should be blamed; if there is a pattern of mistakes they should be shown the door as quickly as possible.
> With the advent of modern management theories it is becoming common for organizations to deal with problems in a collective manner, by dividing programs into subprograms, with no one left responsible for the entire effort.
This is the tendency of all bureaucracies, everywhere, always. At least companies can be outcompeted - not so easy with governments.
It actually has become worse than that in many cases. Instead of being distributed to the collective "we", responsibility is often pushed down to the lower ranks in a systematic way.
A good example for this is Dieselgate, where management asked for "creativity" from James Liang and other engineers, knowing very well that they were driving their employees into muddy water without getting dirty themselves.
A simple example could be you asking your lawyer to prepare a contract for a deal. The deal is sealed but when shit hits the fan you realize the contract had huge holes in it.
Your lawyer is accountable for botching the contract, but at the end of the day you signed it so you're the one having full responsibility.
And we have that in spades in our work: you buy a license for a service, they're accountable but you're responsible.
From a cursory glance, it seems like RACI is confused, not you. Any description I find on RACI seems to conflate accountability with responsibility and it looks like a mess.
Accountability means something enirely different to responsibility. Being accountable means being able to explain the reasoning behind a decision to a jury of peers -- literally being able to account for the considerations that went into the decision.
A person is accountable with no responsibility if they expect to have to be able to explain their decision, but they don't have to take personal blame or credit for it.
A person is responsible but not accountable if they take personal blame or credit, but nobody is given the right to question their judgment and ask for details around it.
Accountability is a somewhat bureaucratic idea. We want good reasoning, but in the name of efficiency we don't want people to explain their reasoning when they communicate decisions. We also don't want to give people responsibility, and without responsibility we don't trust them to reason well on their own accord, so we reserve the right to grill them about their reasoning after the fact if the outcome turns out bad. (In fully formed bureaucracies this accounting must be recorded in a long report to be filed away for nobody ever to read.)
> When I came to Washington before World War II to head the electrical section of the Bureau of Ships, I found that one man was in charge of design, another of production, a third handled maintenance, while a fourth dealt with fiscal matters. The entire bureau operated that way. It didn’t make sense to me. Design problems showed up in production, production errors showed up in maintenance, and financial matters reached into all areas. I changed the system. I made one man responsible for his entire area of equipment—for design, production, maintenance, and contracting. If anything went wrong, I knew exactly at whom to point. I run my present organization on the same principle.
Rickover was apparently a fan of simple hierarchies. In contrast, Andy Grove like matrix organisation. From "High Output Management":
> It's not because Intel loved ambiguity that we became a hybrid organization. We have tried everything else, and while other models may have been less ambiguous, they simply didn't work. Hybrid organizations and the accompanying dual reporting principle, like a democracy, are not great in and of themselves. They just happen to be the best way for any business to be organized.
There’s also the question of where the rot really started.
I’d say that it goes back fairly far to the early 2000s or so when they should have had a development cadence like “widebody, narrowbody, widebody, narrowbody” because narrowbody is 80% of the market but instead it has been “widebody, widebody, widebody, widebody, yet another widebody”. Airbus and Boeing colluded to compete with one hand behind their backs in this time period which was profitable in the short term but would kill Boeing in the long term if it were not “too essential to national defense to fail” —- that is, with fly-by-wire and better geometry the A320 has more of a future (can even steal some of the widebody business) not the mention Airbus bought the A220 which is a next-generation narrowbody which was developed not by a big manufacturer but a small manufacturer backed by the Canadian government.
Try getting a flight in a modern narrowbody like the E2-Jet or A220 on an airline like Breeze and you will se that nobody would put up with riding in a 737 if they had a choice; even though that kind of plane is small on the outside it feels big on the outside, comfort is much more like a huge plane. It’s one of those things you have to fly to believe.
I recently flew an A220 (Korean Air). When I saw that the plane for the flight was an A220, I was curious what the buzz was over this plane.
It was…alright. It also felt very cramped. Seating was 2-3 across. People had noticeable trouble walking down the aisle. Opening the overhead bins seemed dangerous as it could easily bang someone’s head.
I last took a 737 (unsure of variant, but wasn’t a Max) in 2022, but I don’t remember it being as cramped as the A220.
Personally, I think the issue isn't one of degrees or qualifications, but rather one of values.
The CEO prior to this one (Muilenburg) also had degrees in Aerospace Engineering, but chose to value profit maximization over things like security and a good engineering culture. Innocent people had to pay the price for it.
You're right about Calhoun- I was actually referring to Dennis Muilenburg, the CEO who was fired in 2019 after the two 737 MAX crashes and the subsequent groundings. My comment wasn't clear enough- I'll edit it for clarity.
I personally don't see a big reason why the CEO of Boeing needs a Engineering degree. This seems to me to be a scapegoat, there are plenty of bad CEOs with Engineering degrees.
I'd argue that the COO or another position needs to have this qualification and have the power to bring up these risks to the CEO/Board. Someone needs to understanding engineering, be close to the ground but also have the power to bring things up to the CEO to make appropriate decisions.
If you had one, you would know how much you need to suffer to explain to non technical people why a development direction is better than another, and how much it will profit the company in the end.
You could tone this better. The clearest argument is that cost cutting for stock buybacks involves the same thinking, whether accountant or engineer. Since 2014, the CEO is explicitly compensated this way.
It's depressing how quickly the move has been from thriving Republic to downfall with very little actual Empire in the middle. The Romans at least got to enjoy a couple hundred years of wine, revelry and decadence before things broke down completely.
If you are part of the military industrial complex or the neocon establishment clique then the last three decades (since the start of the unipolar moment) have been extremely enjoyable and decadent as you get a free pass to milk the American empire.
You get lauded by the media as a hero for bombing arabs from the sky with zero possibility of defeat (and if the devastating horror inflected on the civilian population is revealed you get to throw the leakers in a dungeon - see Assange).
All the while transferring a huge chunk of taxpayer money to your chums by giving them lucrative defence contract to wage these pointless wars that do nothing strategically but extend the US debt to astronomical levels (which the entire world must finance due to the dollar hegemony), then in turn your chums reward you with board positions and various other kickbacks (book deals and university, think tank and media jobs).
You face zero possibility of being held accountable for your decisions because while politicians come and go your unelected position is secure and the population scarcely pays attention to foreign policy or public debt.
So when I first looked into Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrup-Grumman, L3Harris and others as an investor, I expected huge margins and booming profits.
Instead I found they have steady earnings with between -5 and +10 % margin. Hardly Republic-eating stuff.
I’m right there with you on public debt, although this is a problem throughout the rich world.
I agree with you, but putting let's not pretend that neocons are the only ones looting the treasury. There's plenty of Democrats getting fat and happy too.
I highly recommend "The Fourth Turning is Here" by Neil Howe. According to the generational theory he co-developed (1):
"The theory states that a crisis recurs in American history after every fourth generation which is followed by a recovery (high). During this recovery, institutions and communitarian values are strong. Ultimately, succeeding generational archetypes attack and weaken institutions in the name of autonomy and individualism, which eventually creates a tumultuous political environment that ripens conditions for another crisis"
We're in a crisis period now. In all his books have provided the best explanation for the highs and lows in American society
If you can't get to the book, just look him up in any podcast or YouTube. But really the books are where the really detailed, convincing evidence lives.
Apparently in 1971 the Bretton-Woods agreement[1] was "suspended" and America went off the gold standard. Because the US dollar became both a fiat currency[2] and a reserve currency[3], it meant that we could print as much money as we like. Printing money directly fuels corruption and income inequality. Rather than reconciling bad decisions and balancing a budget, you just print more money. Financialization[4], a force which frequently gets referenced in Boeing threads, is just another consequence of poor monetary policy, as is decline of Rule of Law[5].
Ray Dalio's Principles for a Changing World Order is the best explanation I've seen for the general state of America and its clear decline (45m): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xguam0TKMw8
Exactly. Emmanuel Todd says it in his own way : in the US your best bet is always to work in or around finance, because printing money became the main business in the country. That's also why the US must import engineers massively, for instance. That's why the military industry is under such pressure, because it can't rely upon huge numbers of Indians, Chinese or Russians to conceive and build its airplanes, missiles and nuclear submarines.
There is plenty of corruption and income inequality regardless of money printing velocity. What would be the causal link between them? There was huge corruption in former Eastern/Soviet Block countries where prices were more or less stable. There was huge inequality in gold-standard feudalism.
Almost everyone now can afford wine and some decadance, from a Roman standard. Roman decadence was grapes and wine and meats and sex. Far more people now have access to far better things than the Romans ever experienced.
From what I've read, the best years were during the "Five Good Emperors" period, so about a century, but even during the civil unrest periods things were OK if you stayed in your villa with your slaves and vineyards (OK relative to the poor, of course).
I'm currently listening around the final years of the Flavian dynasty and I'm wondering when these "couple hundred years of wine, revelry and decadence [in the post-Augustian Empire]" are supposed to arrive.
This is worth meditating! The American empire, like the British before it and the other european while we're at it, are flashes in the pan compared to the Romans, the Byzantines, the Ottomans. It could be that hypocrisy, racism and just wanting the oil/diamonds/gold/consumers is not a formula for lasting success.
Depressing, perhaps, if you're part of the nobility. Heartening, perhaps, of you're one of the workers building the palaces of revelry but never getting to enjoy them.
Essentially, society is highly inequitable, instability is to be expected and is probably only a negative if you're living it up. If you're part of the higher classes gaining rent -- in any form -- from others needs then you'd probably want this 'empire' to live for ever.
Where do people get these class warfare talking points? Is there a new wave of teenagers discovering Das Kapital and then saying stuff like this online?
CEOs don't like this fact, because it severely limits their career opportuninties.
In Italy we had Marchionne more or less an insurance salesman.
He lead FIAT group into oblivion, he tried to clear the books by simply canceling the development of a car model. Instead, he destroyed the company.
That's what's great about being CEO. No matter what you do, it really doesn't matter and noone can evaluate what you did to any significan level of confidence.
I have no doubt that before the first MAX crash, the Financial Times was gushing about how great a value the Boeing stock was, with the order books being full for the years to come...
Engineering teaches problem-solving, critical thinking, and a systematic approach to addressing issues—all valuable in developing a strong security culture. A CEO who understands the technical intricacies of aircraft manufacturing is more likely to prioritize safety and security as non-negotiable aspects of the business model.
Just as a reminder, the former CEO, Dennis Muilenburg, likely responsible for this mess, does have a engineering background:
"He received a bachelor's degree in Aerospace Engineering from Iowa State University, followed by a master's degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics from the University of Washington."
The long time CEO of ASML, probably one of the most successful engineering companies of the last two decades, is an accountant by training. But if you hear him speak it's all about the quality of the product and delivering value to the customer. The CEO of Boeing should have his priorities right and be willing to listen to his engineers instead of maximizing profits by reducing cost. What he did in college is not that important in my opinion.
This is also what annoys me about the discourse saying that MBAs ruined the company. As an individual with a science undergrad, engineering postgraduate, and soon to be MBA, any decent MBA program teaches you how to assess things like value proposition, key factors in your offer (eg perception of safety!), with profitability/finance being only one arm of the total educational package you're engaged in.
There's a lot of nuance to finding the right leadership as a board.
Instead they should not have an MBA or background in finance,
marketing, public relations, or any of those faux "professional"
skills that cause perfectly rational STEM thinkers to throw logic and
evidence to the crows and start toadying, bamboozling and
"compromising".
By all means hire and delegate to necessary specialists, accountants,
PR people etc. But do not head critical engineering missions with
people who've lost focus because they've been corrupted. Otherwise the
tail wags the dog.
It'd help China in their efforts to break in to the sector. You want risk-averse CEOs, increasing the personal risk faced by CEOs will tilt the selection process towards people who are delusional and create incentives for the best people to avoid the job.
Fining companies is a much better approach. Companies understand financial signals.
You have to go back much further, to the late 90's. Because the problems in the industry takes a long time to surface. Muilenburg was a product of the deteriorated culture in Boeing and of course could not do anything but continue along the same path.
"and of course could not do anything but continue along the same path"
But I am not so sure about that. You do not have absolute power as a CEO, but you can influence some things. Like hiring people checking for quality. And if they find things (and they would have, if they were competent) then fixing them before crashes would have been waaaay cheaper.
He inherited an already rotten corpse. It was McDonell Douglas MBAs that caused this in their ever lasting search for shareholder value above everything else. These processes take decades. Blaming the last CEO is a bit narrow minded.
The trigger was pulled by Boeing lifer who started out as Engineer, and the McDonnel Douglas CEO who followed him was also someone who started out as Engineer.
Both of them were instrumental in the divestment, outsourcing, and other strategies that created for example Spirit Aerosystems out of Boeing Wichita.
Readit News
The speech is well worth a read in its entirety and it feels prescient in regards to Boeing. I think this paragraph more than any other hits at the core problem at Boeing:
> Unless the individual truly responsible can be identified when something goes wrong, no one has really been responsible. With the advent of modern management theories it is becoming common for organizations to deal with problems in a collective manner, by dividing programs into subprograms, with no one left responsible for the entire effort. There is also the tendency to establish more and more levels of management, on the theory that this gives better control. These are but different forms of shared responsibility, which easily lead to no one being responsible—a problems that often inheres in large corporations as well as in the Defense Department.
To contrast here is a statement from Calhoun: “We caused the problem. And we understand that. Over these last few weeks, I've had tough conversations with our customers, with our regulators, congressional leaders, and more. We understand why they are angry, and we will work to earn their confidence,” Calhoun said.
That we is him failing to take personal responsibility and choosing instead to spread responsibility to all employees, making no one responsible for the state of Boeing.
Boeing needs a leader who will take personal responsibility.
I have been feeling cynical about the "blameless" culture seeping into entire organizations recently. At the end of some quarters where my team has fallen behind, I run away from the question of "who was really at fault here?". I probably should not do that...
If people know there is a risk of blame, it changes their behavior. It creates incentives to destroy evidence, or avoid creating it in the first place. It creates incentives to stay inside your organizational and political boundaries rather than reach out to solve problems. Whereas if you have a successful blameless culture it is much easier to find out what actually happened.
Those are often confused.
Of course you can go deeper and ask why was this process not done correctly etc but at the end of the day, it’s about actionable changes that ensure mistakes don’t get repeated.
Maybe we need a new way of expressing "blameless" that still expresses that personal responsibilty for quality work should be expected, but that punitive blame politics are simply a very ineffective way of encouraging that or finding the truth when problems inevitably occur.
Making it clear who did it does not mean firing that person or making them feel like shit internally, it's a learning process, but the higher up you go the more you should feel bad (presumably you went through the learning process and earning big bucks as a result, so wtf)
Leadership is always to blame if something goes wrong, it's only fair as they will get the credit if things go right. That's the price of leadership.
This is the tendency of all bureaucracies, everywhere, always. At least companies can be outcompeted - not so easy with governments.
A good example for this is Dieselgate, where management asked for "creativity" from James Liang and other engineers, knowing very well that they were driving their employees into muddy water without getting dirty themselves.
A simple example could be you asking your lawyer to prepare a contract for a deal. The deal is sealed but when shit hits the fan you realize the contract had huge holes in it.
Your lawyer is accountable for botching the contract, but at the end of the day you signed it so you're the one having full responsibility.
And we have that in spades in our work: you buy a license for a service, they're accountable but you're responsible.
Accountability means something enirely different to responsibility. Being accountable means being able to explain the reasoning behind a decision to a jury of peers -- literally being able to account for the considerations that went into the decision.
A person is accountable with no responsibility if they expect to have to be able to explain their decision, but they don't have to take personal blame or credit for it.
A person is responsible but not accountable if they take personal blame or credit, but nobody is given the right to question their judgment and ask for details around it.
Accountability is a somewhat bureaucratic idea. We want good reasoning, but in the name of efficiency we don't want people to explain their reasoning when they communicate decisions. We also don't want to give people responsibility, and without responsibility we don't trust them to reason well on their own accord, so we reserve the right to grill them about their reasoning after the fact if the outcome turns out bad. (In fully formed bureaucracies this accounting must be recorded in a long report to be filed away for nobody ever to read.)
Rickover was apparently a fan of simple hierarchies. In contrast, Andy Grove like matrix organisation. From "High Output Management":
> It's not because Intel loved ambiguity that we became a hybrid organization. We have tried everything else, and while other models may have been less ambiguous, they simply didn't work. Hybrid organizations and the accompanying dual reporting principle, like a democracy, are not great in and of themselves. They just happen to be the best way for any business to be organized.
I’d say that it goes back fairly far to the early 2000s or so when they should have had a development cadence like “widebody, narrowbody, widebody, narrowbody” because narrowbody is 80% of the market but instead it has been “widebody, widebody, widebody, widebody, yet another widebody”. Airbus and Boeing colluded to compete with one hand behind their backs in this time period which was profitable in the short term but would kill Boeing in the long term if it were not “too essential to national defense to fail” —- that is, with fly-by-wire and better geometry the A320 has more of a future (can even steal some of the widebody business) not the mention Airbus bought the A220 which is a next-generation narrowbody which was developed not by a big manufacturer but a small manufacturer backed by the Canadian government.
Try getting a flight in a modern narrowbody like the E2-Jet or A220 on an airline like Breeze and you will se that nobody would put up with riding in a 737 if they had a choice; even though that kind of plane is small on the outside it feels big on the outside, comfort is much more like a huge plane. It’s one of those things you have to fly to believe.
It was…alright. It also felt very cramped. Seating was 2-3 across. People had noticeable trouble walking down the aisle. Opening the overhead bins seemed dangerous as it could easily bang someone’s head.
I last took a 737 (unsure of variant, but wasn’t a Max) in 2022, but I don’t remember it being as cramped as the A220.
He does not shy away from taking responsibility (and loudly boasting about it / taking credit on Twitter/x).
The CEO prior to this one (Muilenburg) also had degrees in Aerospace Engineering, but chose to value profit maximization over things like security and a good engineering culture. Innocent people had to pay the price for it.
https://www.boeing.com/company/bios/david-l-calhoun
> Calhoun has a bachelor’s degree in accounting from Virginia Tech.
I'd argue that the COO or another position needs to have this qualification and have the power to bring up these risks to the CEO/Board. Someone needs to understanding engineering, be close to the ground but also have the power to bring things up to the CEO to make appropriate decisions.
If you had one, you would know how much you need to suffer to explain to non technical people why a development direction is better than another, and how much it will profit the company in the end.
You get lauded by the media as a hero for bombing arabs from the sky with zero possibility of defeat (and if the devastating horror inflected on the civilian population is revealed you get to throw the leakers in a dungeon - see Assange).
All the while transferring a huge chunk of taxpayer money to your chums by giving them lucrative defence contract to wage these pointless wars that do nothing strategically but extend the US debt to astronomical levels (which the entire world must finance due to the dollar hegemony), then in turn your chums reward you with board positions and various other kickbacks (book deals and university, think tank and media jobs).
You face zero possibility of being held accountable for your decisions because while politicians come and go your unelected position is secure and the population scarcely pays attention to foreign policy or public debt.
So when I first looked into Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrup-Grumman, L3Harris and others as an investor, I expected huge margins and booming profits.
Instead I found they have steady earnings with between -5 and +10 % margin. Hardly Republic-eating stuff.
I’m right there with you on public debt, although this is a problem throughout the rich world.
"The theory states that a crisis recurs in American history after every fourth generation which is followed by a recovery (high). During this recovery, institutions and communitarian values are strong. Ultimately, succeeding generational archetypes attack and weaken institutions in the name of autonomy and individualism, which eventually creates a tumultuous political environment that ripens conditions for another crisis"
We're in a crisis period now. In all his books have provided the best explanation for the highs and lows in American society
If you can't get to the book, just look him up in any podcast or YouTube. But really the books are where the really detailed, convincing evidence lives.
(1) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generat...
Ray Dalio's Principles for a Changing World Order is the best explanation I've seen for the general state of America and its clear decline (45m): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xguam0TKMw8
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_money [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_currency [4]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financialization [5]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_law
Which Romans?
I’m fairly sure a lot of powerful Americans have enjoyed a couple hundred years of good wine and some decadence.
I’ve been enjoying The History of Rome podcast. It seems like the most consistent thing was civil wars which were followed by purges.
I'm currently listening around the final years of the Flavian dynasty and I'm wondering when these "couple hundred years of wine, revelry and decadence [in the post-Augustian Empire]" are supposed to arrive.
Dead Comment
Essentially, society is highly inequitable, instability is to be expected and is probably only a negative if you're living it up. If you're part of the higher classes gaining rent -- in any form -- from others needs then you'd probably want this 'empire' to live for ever.
Under it all lies greed, and over-population.
Dead Comment
In Italy we had Marchionne more or less an insurance salesman. He lead FIAT group into oblivion, he tried to clear the books by simply canceling the development of a car model. Instead, he destroyed the company.
Financial Times considered Marchionne as having been "one of the boldest business leaders of his generation".
The brand in practice doesn't exist anymore, it has been merged.
The most important thing about the guy: he didn't like electric cars. Such a small man.
Sorry for the italian page: https://www.panorama.it/economia/panda-punto-bravo-modelli-f...
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/612389-the-three-most-harmf...
Skin in the Game!
Deleted Comment
"He received a bachelor's degree in Aerospace Engineering from Iowa State University, followed by a master's degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics from the University of Washington."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Muilenburg
So this alone is apparently not enough.
There's a lot of nuance to finding the right leadership as a board.
the same happens for tech founders without a management degree acting as ceo.
Instead they should not have an MBA or background in finance, marketing, public relations, or any of those faux "professional" skills that cause perfectly rational STEM thinkers to throw logic and evidence to the crows and start toadying, bamboozling and "compromising".
By all means hire and delegate to necessary specialists, accountants, PR people etc. But do not head critical engineering missions with people who've lost focus because they've been corrupted. Otherwise the tail wags the dog.
Fining companies is a much better approach. Companies understand financial signals.
"and of course could not do anything but continue along the same path"
But I am not so sure about that. You do not have absolute power as a CEO, but you can influence some things. Like hiring people checking for quality. And if they find things (and they would have, if they were competent) then fixing them before crashes would have been waaaay cheaper.
https://www.boeing.com/company/bios/david-l-calhoun
> Calhoun has a bachelor’s degree in accounting from Virginia Tech.
Both of them were instrumental in the divestment, outsourcing, and other strategies that created for example Spirit Aerosystems out of Boeing Wichita.