People warned about exactly what happened already back in the time when the merger happened that introduced beancounter culture to Boeing.
The problem was, as always, no one listens to the warners and the whiners when there is money to be made.
Highly optimized systems are fragile. They work well so long as everything stays the same. Optimizing for cost will compromise other things. Quality is not a varnish to be applied after you make something, it's designed into the product and production process from the beginning - by people who understand such things.
But it's such a massive clusterfuck for Boeing that it seems like MBA programs should be reformed from the ground up.
As if it wasn't the result of what has been taught for decades, now coming of age more bigly than ever ;)
>MBA programs should be reformed from the ground up.
Who would do the reforming though?
Academic leaders? That could be like having the inmates running the asylum :)
From the ground up?
If you're not careful they could end up building an insane new institution at a massive scale in an image grandiose enough that it could crush GE or something ;)
And no, I'm not an MBA . . .
The underlying defect is a system which allows absolutely poor performers to advance based on an overwhelming focus on greed and ambition for power.
When it has become more popularly acceptable to allow it to become so.
The most unsuitable candidates for leading people are what the mainstream finds acceptable or even desirable once the culture shift swings this far.
With either a reduced number of key positions that can afford to be occupied by a dud (or worse), or an increased number of limited-ability competitors prevailing on the basis of their dedication to leveraging greed and even treachery, the kind of leader that's really needed is less likely to advance from entry-level at all.
What would really help would be a culture that inhibits those unsuitable individuals from arising toward those limited number of key positions to begin with.
Do you have an idea of what would be the failure mode(s)?
If sales/marketing runs the restaurant it's full but there is no food. The menu is beautiful and shows all kinds of dishes nobody knows how to make.
If MBAs run the restaurant it's full of people paid to be there long enough to be counted and reported up to the investors and the food is purchased from the McDonalds next door and relabeled and resold at 3X the price. Nobody will ever come back but it doesn't matter. The metrics from this exercise are used to raise money to open three more restaurants across the street from convenient sources of cheap fast food. This novel model of running restaurants is written up in Harvard Business Review as an excellent example of an arbitrage business model.
If artists run the restaurant they make and eat the food themselves and then leave.
