| I think you have some fanciful ideas that simply are not borne out by reality. >this is why key employees are often upgraded from mere tools to investors by the issuance of stock options - that sort of thing is never going to happen in a company like Boeing merely because of our culture. What are you talking about? I don't know about Boeing specifically, but stock options were very commonly awarded to engineers back before the big 2008 market crash. I had them when I worked at Intel. They sure didn't cause any change in my behavior; the effect of any one engineer at a company that large is usually pretty negligible for the company's stock price, and stock options are a very small portion of an engineer's overall compensation package. After the market crash, it seemed like stock options mostly fell out of favor (because they all became worthless!), and these days companies now offer RSUs, if they offer anything at all. Stock options were a big deal in the dot-com days because tech companies' valuations were inflating so quickly, so those options represented a LOT of potential profit, but not so much after the 2000 crash. Anyway, the point is, you're talking about stock options like they'd solve this problem, and as if they aren't already common. I'm not sure how common they are now (they don't see to be so much), but they absolutely were in the past, and I don't see any evidence that it made a difference. >If Boeing had granted partial corporate ownership to technical employees they would advocate much harder for the caution that could have averted this incident What makes you think they didn't? Or that it would make a difference? Stock options don't give engineers any authority to override executive decisions by management. They can either do what the executives say, or get fired and lose all those options (unless they've vested). Either way, it gives them no real power. The simple fact is that a company is not a democracy, and is much more like a dictatorship (or a cabal I guess, with the board picking the dictator but having the power to replace him at will). I can't even imagine any large company working well with a democratic style leadership when competing with others with traditional management. The simple solution is that companies like Boeing have to have very strong regulation to oversee their operations and make sure they make safe products, and that's the government's job; there's countless examples throughout history showing that expecting any organization to police itself effectively without some kind of checks by outside organizations doesn't work well. The FAA and by extension the US Government totally failed in their job here, and so did the foreign regulators to a certain extent (by trusting the FAA too much). >Given a different company culture Boeing's company culture is a product of the country it resides in. I don't see how you're going to change Boeing's culture without changing America's culture. |