In my What Happened at Boeing? post, I recounted some of the disturbing tales told by Matt Stoller of how a dysfunctional management team of Boeing succeeded in taking what was arguably the world’s foremost aircraft design and manufacturing company and turning it into a travesty of itself that produced a plane so flawed that it killed 346 people before it was grounded.
There’s a nice followup to Stoller’s post by Maureen Tkacik in The New Republic that provides a few more details on how bad that management was and how their decisions lead directly to the 737 MAX disaster. Whereas the old Boeing management all had aviation backgrounds and focused on building the best aircraft possible, the post-merger management were mostly finance people concerned solely with bean counting and politics.
A telling example of that was the McDonnell Douglas CEO at the time of the merger who, as Tkacik says, “…liked to use what he called the “Hollywood model” for dealing with engineers: Hire them for a few months when project deadlines are nigh, fire them when you need to make numbers.” Making the numbers was all the new management team cared about. Any management team has to care about fiscal matters, of course, but that shouldn’t be their sole concern, especially when lives are at stake.
Reading Tkacik’s account is a bit overwhelming as she goes over the myriad bad decisions made mostly to ensure that 737 pilots would not have to undergo simulator training to recertify for the 737 MAX. It’s daunting but well worth reading. Of course, engineers are already familiar with its lessons; it’s management that really needs to read her article.