> What Boeing really needs is a complete change in management culture
Who is ultimately responsible for management at a company though? The CEO and the other C-level people. This isn't really the daunting difficult problem you make it out to be: the buck stops at the C-suite. Who else could possibly be ultimately responsible??
Technically the board is ultimately responsible for management. It’s the board’s responsibiity to hire delegates and to monitor their performance.
That’s how it’s supposed to work, but it seems to me it’s been a very long time since board have been anything other than rubber stamps for the CEO.
As far as I understand, the legal theory is that the CEO and the directors are organs of the company rather than natural persons when acting in their roles. Therefore some of the usual legal protections do not apply. Assigning liability like that is an inherent part of the social trade-off that allows limited liability companies to exist.
You can identify the people responsible. I won't bother to explain it all, but at very step of the manufacturing process different workers signed off on the integrity of their work. All of that paperwork was logged with the US government. If you let me peruse those papers I could tell you who designed each and every component of the landing gear, and which workers assembled that landing gear on each and every MAX out there. I can tell you which executives signed off on it, and if you subpoena the documents I could even tell you what they were all emailing back and forth. More importantly, I can tell you which QA engineers and executives were involved in the QA and testing process for that landing gear and give you the results of the tests they ran. So on and so forth, all the way up to the CEO.
We can identify people. We've simply decided that we won't. You guys are arguing an orthogonal point as to whether or not to hold C level executives accountable. I can tell you right now you're going to effect much better change if you target key executives at the director-VP level than if you target C level people.
We do need to get rid of the rats. And a lot of those are C level executives, but it's important right now to get rid of all the rats. And right now, many of those rats are being promoted.
The regulators are also culpable since the design of the system was in the public domain before the second crash and they did nothing about it.
This is currently an advantageous single point-of-failure for companies and CEOs, and the advantage grows the more safety critical the industry that they're in. The company structure prevents any real responsibility except when the crime is blatant (like the CEO was recorded or wrote down something).
CEOs, surprisingly are protected by the law as well.
You are the one person on the planet (I hope) who believes a leader is not responsible for those under his leadership.
Before you take offence understand this is just a difference of opinion of what a leader is, nothing against you personally.
I feel that punishing sobriety and rewarding drunkenness is probably not a good idea, if we want to avoid our ships hitting icebergs.
The junior watch officer should have summoned the master long before the ship hit an iceberg, if they are inattentive (e.g. they fall asleep in the warm dark of a bridge at night) the BNWAS will alarm to try to wake them, then eventually summon senior officers (typically the master, but maybe also a chief engineer and others) to the bridge. The master is responsible for ensuring the BNWAS is operable.
It would be extremely unusual for a commercial vessel (not to mention military vessel) to allow officers to drink booze, especially enough booze to fall "asleep in a drunken stupor". Of course just because something is prohibited doesn't mean it won't happen, but now we're talking about culpability and of course you're culpable if as a foreseeable consequence of your prohibited actions bad things happen, that's negligence at best.
Of course no good captain would leave the ship in control of a new second in command in hard conditions. However sometimes the second in command would be captain years ago if there was need for a captain but there isn't, and then there is flexibility.
No. But also, this is not the situation.
Besides, Understaffed/Poorly staffed orgs tend to have more issues like this anyway... which tends to be the result of executive decisions, right?
Being too insulated from day to day ops is a symptom, not an excuse.
A the time honored excuse of "sorry mister officer I did not know the car I was driving was stolen, I just found it on the road a few days ago and had no idea I swear".
It feels like maybe the financial industry made some reforms along these lines, right? Where they established that somebody specific in an executive position was required to sign personally guaranteeing that various financial filings were not fraudulent?
Presumably that personal risk incentivized said executive staff to want to know more rather than less, and the residual risk (of having to stand by your word) became priced into the pay packages.
You are responsible for your property (land) and can be sued quite successfully for issues you had no knowledge of and no way of knowing.
The only reasons some folks push up there to the top are 2 - power, and money. They receive extra money because they are holding massive responsibility for their part or whole corporation. Lets stop finding reasons why there is actually 0 real responsibility on them. Its literally part of the deal they sign up for, and they know it very well.
Yes, it may sometimes mean that they get the heat for something caused by their predecessors, its part of the risk they take on themselves by pushing into such role. Its still firmly their failure, ie to a) identify it; b) act upon it. But as we see this wasn't a priority in Boeing, and I presume it still isn't.
There'd be a filtering effect where the best and brightest avoid industries where we need them to be. That standard would likely reduce the quality of the leadership and bias it further towards people who are delusional about safety.
You say this like it's crazy, but we literally already do this with Doctors and Surgeons, it's not as tricky as you make it sound.
There's no valid reason that CEO/C-Suite folks get to forever escape any responsibility and accountability.
CEOs are appointed based on their ability to do what the board wants while shielding the board - this is why they get paid the most
Until investors and the board significantly hurt, to the point where their investment is either a total loss, or they are liable for additional financial inputs then nothing will change
If that big CEO paycheck came with some actual risks if you ignored ethics then maybe there would be fewer CEOs willing to do that.
Boards want the media to focus on the CEO because they are literally there to shield the board from accountability while “taking the brunt” of the bad PR - and also being a show piece for the company in good times
So, the real answer IMO is to change the law to implicate board members and investors directly as though they are officers equivalent with the CEO is setting corporate direction and incentives
Of course they have intentionally made the law such that any actions taken by the corporation, limit the liability of the board legally, while not taking the power away from the board to drive the direction and priorities and incentives of the corporation
The whole thing is an accountability shell game - Wherein a CEO is the whipping boy for whatever the board needs them to be the whipping boy for - and there’s a balance and ownership
The simplest way to put it is that the CEO is there to ensure that everything, the company does benefits investors primarily.
Until it is legally the case that corporate leadership must prioritize the benefits to labor above investors, nothing functionally is going to change.
Yes the Captain of a Ship is always responsible for everything that happens on his ship 100%.
That's not how this works. The shareholders don't have direct authority over the decisions made by the company's chief officers. They can demand "higher profits" all day long, but that doesn't absolve the board of directors or management from their responsibility, and it doesn't give them a blank check to behave unethically or even criminally.
> or, to generalize even more, capitalism.
Ugh, that is such a knee-jerk, fallacious take. Short-sightedness and misalignment of incentives are traits that are hardly specific to capitalism.
