Mr. Cooper didn’t send or receive the messages, the latest batch of which Boeing disclosed to lawmakers and the news media in January, this person said. Those messages show Boeing employees mocking airline officials, aviation regulators and even their own colleagues. In one, an employee said the 737 MAX had been “designed by clowns, who in turn are supervised by monkeys.”
Boeing Chief Executive David Calhoun, who has called the messages “totally appalling,” has said he aimed to stamp out such behavior and hold managers accountable. “Awareness in the leadership ranks around whether that’s happening or not is not an excuse if it’s happening,” Mr. Calhoun said in a call with reporters in January, shortly after taking over as CEO. “Disciplinary actions have to be taken.”
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To summarize:
They fired a guy for not knowing about emails he did not send or receive where engineers were voicing their internal concerns that the 737 MAX design was lacking.
Boeing's take away wasn't, "People knew something was wrong and didn't have a way to properly voice that concern."
Boeing's take away was, "Middle management should have sufficiently threatened those under their supervision into self-censoring their concerns."
Seems like a super-healthy corporate culture that would simultaneously be a fun place to work and produce the best products /s
This is a chemist's view from the trenches. A manager who hasn't been brought up in the engineering mindset wouldn't even be able to understand any of the points in that blogpost, which partially explains the trouble that pharmaceutical companies are finding themselves in. You cannot bribe or cheat observable reality.
Sometimes you have to go with a less capable result because the alternative will take too long or cost too much to develop, or (since we're talking aerospace here) weigh too much.
The trick, of course, is to know exactly how good is enough.
>The resulting giant took Boeing’s name. More unexpectedly, it took its culture and strategy from McDonnell Douglas
https://www.msn.com/en-za/money/news/how-the-mcdonnell-dougl...
If a company is not corrupt, it's not able to backchannel a big part of the money.
Maybe being a total dick gives you a free pass at Boeing.
They should instead promote a system that discovers the clowns-and-monkeys comments in order to address the concerns revealed by the comments rather than attempt to stamp out the only negative feedback loop they had.
Instead they seem to have hired another “monkey” for CEO. Hope they hire a better person before even more damage to corporate culture happens.
I think a good answer as a CEO would be to tell managers to be more careful in emails, but no real punishment. However, the criticism in the emails was pretty low content, it's not like this was a message that said, man those monkeys really screwed up the MCAS or something. I think you might see messages like that even on well designed products, people get frustrated.
Which, honestly shocked me they were sending emails like that in the first place. Talk among yourselves at the lunch table, complain in private and try to talk to someone in management who will listen.
It was 2018 for god's sake. Do these engineers still not know how stupid it is to be sending emails like that around the company? Maybe it just highlights how out of touch the culture was there to begin with? It just seems reckless and these people should be smart enough to know better.
I've started to wonder over the past few years myself: maybe in some cases they very much do, and it's not stupid at all? If you know such emails may come out in case of trouble, then it can in turn become a tool for a low level of whistleblowing/accountability in a hard situation. A lot of us are fortunate enough to not be placed in professional/personal situations where we'd see something with life-safety consequences and not be able to blow the whistle or feel comfortable walking away. But what if one were, or what if the situation is genuinely gray? Like, you get the feeling something may be off the tracks in process, and your management chain/reporting processes aren't responsive, but it's not actually at all clear from your level that it's really important. Maybe it's just you. Sending a "private" email with your concerns to a coworker over official email might be then be a good way to bookmark that. If nothing ever happens it'll forever remain an undiscovered internal email. But if things ever go so wrong that the company actually faces subpoenas from the government over it than there will be a record.
I mean, what you're saying seems to imply that the engineers should have been concerned about keeping Boeing's bad behavior private right? Well, should they? Yeah the company under its modern McDonnell Douglas leadership certainly doesn't want emails like that coming out following the deaths of hundreds of people due to a bunch of company blunders. But I don't think it follows that engineers shouldn't want emails like that coming out. If they're angry enough, they may even actively want such emails to reveal exactly how bad things had gotten internally, in ways that really would embarrass leadership in a newspaper headline or Congressional hearing.
"Don't send emails like that because they could end up in eDiscovery."
How about, don't do things in a way where eDiscovery is likely to be an outcome, and actually foster processes that act on quality issues instead of telling the people you're shouldering with making this work with enough weight on their conscience that the only way they feel like they can cope with the foreseeable tragedy is to at least make sure there is some note in the record somewhere that they tried and could do nothing despite it all?
I have absolutely no respect for for anyone who is so caught up with these messages sound, that they can't read between the lines to see the picture of the completely dysfunctional dynamic these people had to be operating within.
The lower an engineer ends up stooping, the worse and more endemic the problems they are facing likely are. If your company has those types of email at all, whether they get out should be the least of your concerns!
The mentality being demonstrated admonishing delivery and sweating on the damage from dirty laundry being aired instead of the fact there is dirty laundry to air at all is like worrying whether or not you left the faucet on when your house is below sea level, and the tsunami is already on the way.
And apologies to those from New Orleans, or the Netherlands; to be fair I could have used leaving the burner on and fires on the way and pissed off the Californians and Aussies, but water was the first thing that came to mind.
And I'm not letting the engineers entirely off the hook either! If they felt that strongly, they should have walked away to, but I can forgive a lot more in the name of familial security than I can the pursuit of profit at all costs.
I suppose it's not a good look if you're looking at an archived conversation and they switch over to PGP, but it's better than this.
I don't know? Unless I'm misunderstanding the story, I'm not sure the guy they fired could have escalated issues he was not informed of? I suppose we could assume that he was informed of the issues, just not via any documented method?
But based only on the information given in the article, I'm just not sure how someone not even in the loop on an issue, can reasonably be expected to escalate that issue?
Maybe I'm misapprehending the article?
I feel like it's the same problems at Boeing, and the same pattern of addressing problems. It will be interesting to see if a publicly traded company will be more effective than a government organization at solving these problems.
[1] At one group in Netflix (which has an aggressive fire fast culture) that I interviewed with, I came to realize the position existed primarily to provide shielding for the managers above it. I reached out to the former person in the role and they confirmed my suspicions. Not the behavior that Netflix was trying to encourage but there you go.
Basically, employees are used as ablative armor for management?
(use https though)
This seems to have changed as the following works for me: https://archive.is/hk4Cd
https://www.morningstar.com/news/dow-jones/202002128400/boei...
so, apparently the leakers?
A lot of companies (especially finance) suffer from title inflation, and also flip Director and VP (i.e, Director is a higher rank than VP).
For example, at Goldman Sachs 30% of all employees are Vice Presidents.
Other places do weirder things. I have a buddy at an insurance company who's a "Second VP" and is basically an "Assistant CIO". Never figured that out.
Normal: President -> Vice-President
Common: President -> Executive VP -> VP
Guessing: President -> Platinum VP -> Exec VP -> VP (It is related to airlines, so just borrowing their classes)
When I last left the IB world, there were many VPs and a decent number of Directors that were individual contributors.
It's funny how "titanium" is somehow such a big thing with marketing names these days, such as with car trim models. It's a pretty neat metal but it isn't particularly valuable. Steel and aluminum are pretty neat metals too, in different ways, but no one uses those in marketing this way.
But, it's more like President > C?O > some other C?O position > Senior VP > VP > etc.
President -> Platinum VP -> Gold VP -> Silver VP -> Bronze VP
On the flip side, I'm working with a company where everyone that should have a "Director" title relative to their authority, knowledge, and experience has been given a VP title... probably because the company isn't very attractive as an employer.
