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.
>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 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)
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)
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.
