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Boeing fired midlevel executive following embarrassing emails

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Re: Boeing fired midlevel executive following embarrassing emails

#81

Post by mark-r »

jessaustin wrote: post #79
mark-r wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kodak gets picked on unfairly I think. When you look at the revenue streams before digital photography took off, you can see that Kodak had their fingers in every part of it - cameras, film, processing, printing. They made money every time you took a picture. There's simply no revenue stream in digital that's big enough to replace that. It's impossible to shrink a company by 90% gracefully.

Kodak may have been boned no matter what, but it's still not the example I seek, of a firm that successfully "played catch against itself".

I was just pointing out that there were reasons it wasn't successful beyond just not being a viable approach.

Re: Boeing fired midlevel executive following embarrassing emails

#82

Post by TylerE »

nate_meurer wrote: post #50
lutorm wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an engineer, I sort of disagree with this. Doing a shoddy job and trying to get away with it is inexcusable, but "good enough" is the gold standard in engineering. No one is helped by spending development time and money by making things better than they have to be. 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 aer…

> "good enough" is the gold standard in engineering. This doesn't really make sense given any common meaning of good enough . A well engineered system or product is optimized . If you want to say that good enough means solving the inherent tradeoffs between safety margins and cost with careful design and precise specs, then you're not talking about the same thing as that blog post, nor would that accurately describe…

Development time and costs are major dimensions to be optimized.

Re: Boeing fired midlevel executive following embarrassing emails

#83

Post by [deleted] »

ihumanable wrote: post #6

From the article: 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 Davi…

[deleted]

Re: Boeing fired midlevel executive following embarrassing emails

#84

Post by thombat »

sct202 wrote: post #46
pkaye wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are some companys who manage it though, by basically getting bi-furicated intwo two seperat internal divisions competing against one another. Sometimes that competing becomes backstabbing between the divisions.

And then the company falls apart when you get a real competitor and the divisions are too busy attacking each other.

And Nokia was one such company, in the latter days of S60 smartphones. One (of many) re-orgs produced three main phone divisions called something like: entertainment, executive, and enterprise, with high-level features partitioned between them [1]. So "entertainment" gets the high-quality auto-focus camera because that's great for blogging hipsters, and "executive" gets the barcode reading software so suits can scan the QR codes on business cards [2] ... except they couldn't because without a decent auto-focus camera the QR code needed to be printed on A3 paper and stuck on the wall to be scanable. Yes, this was discovered in internal testing. Yes, it shipped anyway.

Down in the trenches we made bitter jokes about "three bald men fighting over a comb" as we watched our Lords and Masters engage with the looming competition by making snide public remarks about "that fruit company", having long before killed the touchscreen prototypes. But at least Boeing would have handled this situation differently: we'd have been fired for those jokes.

[1] and what if you're an "executive" working in an "enterprise" who likes to kick back with some "entertainment" on the commute? KA-CHING! you're gonna buy three Nokia phones! Or zero, more likely.

[2] that was seriously advanced as a leading use case. Quite probably by an in-house futurist.

Re: Boeing fired midlevel executive following embarrassing emails

#85

Post by Aperocky »

at-fates-hands wrote: post #42
uxp100 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. As the company, you don't want emails like that coming out, but getting rid of messages like that damages the so called safety culture. 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 t…

>> Yeah. As the company, you don't want emails like that coming out 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 highli…

Huh? Legitimate concern can not be voiced in a humorous and combative way? I think the families of the 347 lives lost would like to have a few words. If ‘inappropriate’ words can bring back their loved one, I’m sure the current Boeing management will be buried under verbal abuse.

Re: Boeing fired midlevel executive following embarrassing emails

#86

Post by HarryHirsch »

mark-r wrote: post #81
jessaustin wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kodak may have been boned no matter what, but it's still not the example I seek, of a firm that successfully "played catch against itself".

I was just pointing out that there were reasons it wasn't successful beyond just not being a viable approach.

Eastman, which was spun out of Kodak in 1994, is doing quite well. Demand for resins, plastic sheets and intermediates to make plastics products hasn't dropped. Kodak had no idea what their core product was going to be, and bulk chemicals would have been a good bet.

Re: Boeing fired midlevel executive following embarrassing emails

#87

Post by epochwolf »

kevstev wrote: post #66
dylan604 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does that even look on an org chart? 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)

At a typical investment bank: President/CEO --> CTO (may also hold corp title of Managing Director, maybe "Senior Managing Director") --> Managing Director --> Director --> VP --> (possibly) AVP --> Peon. When I last left the IB world, there were many VPs and a decent number of Directors that were individual contributors.

I find it amusing that someone would be closer to the CEO through six degrees of separation than through the levels of management.

Re: Boeing fired midlevel executive following embarrassing emails

#88

Post by kelnos »

ferzul wrote: post #62
kjs3 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I work at a bank. The VP track is often on an 'Officer of the Company' track (Officer, Associate VP, VP, Senior VP, etc). Then there's the 'Job Title' track (Manager, Senior Manager, Director, Senior Director, Executive Director, etc). Usually, you have to be a minimum job title for certain officer title, but less the other way. So you can have a Manager who is a VP and a Director that's a AVP, but not a Manage…

i didn't understand that at all. i thought a director is a person elected by shareholders onto the board of directors. but i normally work for small companies!

In most companies, it's both. On the employee side (non-finance) you have things like Manager -> Director -> VP -> C-level (often with "Senior" versions of some of those), but then the people who serve on the board are also called Directors.

Re: Boeing fired midlevel executive following embarrassing emails

#89

Post by manicdee »

lutorm wrote: post #23
HarryHirsch wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps related: https://orgprepdaily.wordpress.com/2007/04/22/on-keeping-you... 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.

As an engineer, I sort of disagree with this. Doing a shoddy job and trying to get away with it is inexcusable, but "good enough" is the gold standard in engineering. No one is helped by spending development time and money by making things better than they have to be. 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 aer…

There is a clear disparity in the understanding of the phrase “good enough.”

The “good enough” from an engineering perspective is, “meets the customer’s specifications and is the best we can do given the constraints of time and money.” It’s about the quality of the product.

The “good enough” in this essay relates to the expenditure of emotional effort in getting your work done to a known standard while management are applying pressure for you to reduce the amount of time and money invested. “Good enough” in this instance relates to the effort exerted. At some point you are not going to try any harder because further effort is counterproductive to your career prospects or financial well-being.

This “good enough” is the lab full of technicians who know the product doesn’t even come close to the specifications it is being marketed towards, but they continue to work because they need food on the table. It’s “good enough” as a dictum from management, not as an informed decision from the product team.

Re: Boeing fired midlevel executive following embarrassing emails

#90

Post by HarryHirsch »

manicdee wrote: post #89
lutorm wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an engineer, I sort of disagree with this. Doing a shoddy job and trying to get away with it is inexcusable, but "good enough" is the gold standard in engineering. No one is helped by spending development time and money by making things better than they have to be. 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 aer…

There is a clear disparity in the understanding of the phrase “good enough.” The “good enough” from an engineering perspective is, “meets the customer’s specifications and is the best we can do given the constraints of time and money.” It’s about the quality of the product. The “good enough” in this essay relates to the expenditure of emotional effort in getting your work done to a known standard while management are…

No, the "good enough" in Milkshake's essay means not conforming to accepted standards, it's good enough only for management, who consciously or unconsciously intend to deceive a client downstream and sell up before someone else notices.

Elsewhere, Milkshake has a story about a biological chemist on a project to develop a delivery vehicle for cancer drugs. This fellow found his results unconvincing, continued working on the problem and ended up demonstrating convincingly that in vivo the vehicle did not behave as intended. Now the company had a problem (the FDA demands that relevant results be reported) because management intended to sell the IP to a hapless bidder, and the chemist's action pierced the veil of plausible deniability: https://orgprepdaily.wordpress.com/2017/08/24/breaking-bad-i...

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