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Why would it need to be an "engineering culture" as opposed to, for example, a "quality culture"? And even if you want to former, why does it need an engineer to create that culture? Does a good movie director also need to be a good writer or actor?

ehvatum 876 days ago

Because building planes is an engineering task.

Let’s use your argument: Would you hire a lawyer to captain a ship? Why not? It’s not like the captain actually steers the ship or oils the engine.

You see? It’s not that hard to think a tiny tiny little bit.

The CEO is building a plane? The head of a shipping company builds ships or captains a ship?

No it’s the executives role to set the culture and nurture the concerns of quality that are lacking in this organization. And quality is a product engineering attribute and a product of manufacturing concerns being powerful enough within an organization to be addressed, so I was making the suggestion that perhaps an engineer should be in the seat until the problem is remedied.

Lots of other disciplines care about quality.

Lots of other disciplines are irrelevant when you’re talking about actual aircraft manufacturing and not the soft concept of quality.

Edit: aircraft engineering organizations require an executive that understands the airline market and how to build airplanes. This company in particular needs a fixer to address quality problems and reassure the market that substantive changes to the quality of manufacturing will be made.

An expert in toy manufacturing who ran Mattel shouldn’t be overseeing jet aircraft production and this idea that they can do so effectively is a big part of the reason companies continually fall down on manufacturing quality and flame out like GE, HP, and now Boeing are doing. Sorry. This idea that a CEO without a background in aerospace can just fly in and fix everything because of transferrable skills sounds good but it’s just simply not true and in fact is the exact and very specific management theory and corporate ideology that is the root cause of the problems at the core issues this company is experiencing*.

hughesjj 875 days ago

I don't think the pedigree matters as much as for the leadership of a company to really know their product and market. I don't think that ex Boeing engineer turned ex Boeing CEO really knew their product given how absurd the procedures sounded to pilots around mcas and now with this de-icing issue.

jpalawaga 876 days ago

what did ballmer do at microsoft before he was CEO? What did microsoft look like after he became CEO?

Same questions, but with Satya. There's a reason Apple strongly prefers to hire from within. Actually, you could ask the same questions about jobs and cook.

You need to live and breathe the company. Further, the executive's background WILL play a role in the company's direction.

vegetablepotpie 876 days ago

Not who you’re responding to, but I agree with the notion that if you want an engineering culture, you need an engineer at the top.

Engineering is one of the few fields that understands value. Most other functions, within a corporation, are more process oriented and have a more transactional world view as a consequence of dealing with costs for most of their activities.

In other words, if you want to slash budgets, lay off staff, and deliver value to shareholders, your faithful MBA is your go to. If you want to build cultures that create products that strive to satisfy arrays of non-functional requires, like efficiency, reliability, and safety, engineering managers have spent their careers building these departments.

You are describing a manager yourself, so not sure we disagree disagree that much.

jsharf 876 days ago

I assume it’s easier to find an engineer who went to engineering school to learn how to build airplanes that are safe than it is to find an MBA who went to business school to learn how to build planes that are safe. (It’s not about the knowledge but about the root desire)

Similarly, I assume it’s harder to find an engineer who went into the field purely for money.

I do think on average engineers will prioritize safety (since they likely understand failure modes and production and long tail statistics better. We literally have to take engineering ethics classes), at the cost of doing a worse job at running the business. But when the business requires this level of safety, that IS doing a good job.

You need to be able to steer a large and complex organisation - being an engineer has nothing to do with that. And, yes, incentives matter, but those can be set.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/10/22/more-top-...

Kinda does though.

No. This just says some engineers can (like some MBAs). There is no intrinsic link between being an engineer and being a great CEO. Most engineers are not executives.

This argument relies on false equivalence and isn’t even rational.

Except top executives are engineering degree holders. They are, and that’s a fact. The majority of top performing companies are headed by engineering degree holding CEOs.

But you keep making the same wrong points and trying to play devils advocate on positions that you don’t back up.

cduzz 876 days ago

Aren't these all "yes, and" examples?

Who do you want, a good director, a good actor, or a director who's a good director and a good actor? Which do you want, a quality culture, an engineering culture, or a quality and engineering culture? Of course one is "in charge" but pretty clearly "engineering" and "quality" aren't even in the room....

Let me put it this way: someone who is a great engineer but has no skill in running and steering a large organisation will fail. Someone who knows how to do the latter might succeed by "using" talented engineers within the organisation.

Or someone who is an engineer with experience running large organizations? Why engineer means automatically no experiencing running large organizations in your mind is baffling.

If you have a great executive ticking all the boxes - splendid.

But there is no intrinsic link between being an engineer and being a good CEO (same holds for other disciplines, btw.). You could have engineers that qualify, lawyers, MBAs, mathematicians, physicists, ...

There is. You’re flat out incorrect.

photonthug 876 days ago

It's an engineering process.. so yes to get quality culture you might want a engineering quality expert, which is to say probably an engineer.

You want engineering quality experts, but not clear at all that needs to be at CEO level. If you have someone with that skill and great experience running large and complex organisations - great take them. If not, take someone who knows how to get organisations to change and do stuff.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/10/22/more-top-...

There is plenty of evidence that engineers in the CEO seat are effective drivers of companies and shareholder value. This is false equivalence reasoning presented over and over in this thread and I dare say this opinion is quite antiquated and precisely the thinking that has put Boeing on its current destructive course.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/insead/2014/05/29/why-engineers...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/10/22/more-top-...

If you have a great engineer and executive take them. But if not, the choice is by no means clear then.

The CEO being an engineer is not sufficient for success.

I never took this position.

Your core arguments are ever changing throughout this thread, and on every reply.

photonthug 876 days ago

Not clear at all that the best CEO is an MBA either. Putting an MBA in charge of engineering processes is like arguing anyone can do it, so if that's the position then why the resistance towards it being an engineer? If you want a culture expert, how about a history prof or an anthropologist? "Experience running large organizations" usually just equates to failing upwards.. run the last few orgs you admin into the ground and hide the debris with outsourcing, mergers, acquisitions, anything that hides your responsibility long enough to dodge accountability, move on to the next before it gets pinned on you. Do that 10 or 15 times, and that's a great career for most of the leadership/culture "experts" in the CEO world. I don't get the apologism or tendency to lionize these people

Why is it always MBA vs engineer? I never advocated for that.

As you point out lots of other choices.

Quality is an engineering attribute: a byproduct of a culture that by definition survives in a company despite profit drive by putting minimum standards and support for people who keep them before or in balance with the bottom line concerns. Quality isn’t a culture, it’s literally a product engineering concerns that get prioritized.

The old school management theory is that engineering leaders are accountable to shipping quality products on time and within budget. That’s it.

But a CEO's historical understanding of engineering operations has been pretty opaque: ships on time, or doesn't. Of course this is lacking everything meaningful about software.

So the same visionary management theory has come up with a concept of DORA metrics. This provides the competency with quality management metrics that allow for decision-making around whether engineering is delivering or not and a whole new level of understanding and abstraction.

But understand that most of the companies that are getting themselves in deep shit right now are doing so because they have removed power from their engineering organizations to the point where, and the service of relentless extraction of shareholder value, they have destroyed their companies and crippled their products. It is happened to quite a few companies and manufacturers in the United States, from GE to Boeing, and from IBM to GM.

The current profit comes from revenue not reputation culture thinks that you can build some level of abstraction to engineering management, and then layer on traditional management theory in order to extract value from a chain of command.

The truth is that engineering lead organizations deliver a great deal, more value to shareholders in the long-term, as they are more focused on building the platforms that create competitive long-term foundations. Companies like Netflix, Google, Apple, and other “tech companies” occupy the top value of the stock market in equities positions around the world, because of the fact that they are able to use software to amplify the value of their innovations at profound levels. But America’s Legacy companies continue to operate as if this lesson is not true they continue to prioritize optimization over platform.

The old system continues to persist with the idea that there must be a professional manager at the top of the organization, rather than someone who is focused on creating value with platforms, and the culture tends to produce these situations of crisis in exploitation, because they do not understand how important it is to create a culture of platform value creation.

So of course, I make the comment that we should have an “engineering experience CEO,” or even an actual engineer in the CEO seat, and predictably it ends up being criticized for the fact that we could have a professional manager in that seat, and don’t actually need an engineer to be a CEO. That’s fine, and I can understand the point you’re raising.

But, it’s been my experience that CEOs that have been in involved in platform, engineering and large scale systems management do a much better job of preserving the culture that creates lasting and durable platform value for companies like Boeing, and this is the value which has been destroyed and the culture which must be resurrected before the company crashes.

So, rather than bringing another abstraction specialist, who will find another metric values system to manage things, which isn’t working, I was suggesting that we should bring in an actual engineer to sleep on the factory floor and make sure that this culture stops before someone dies and the share price drops to unrecoverable levels (where it’s going!).

To expound I’ll say this.

The current culture at Boeing is very much a culture where the engineers don’t speak up. Many of the most passionate people who worked there have been fired or let go because they spoke up so, I think it’s time for a change before one of the most storied and important companies in American history becomes yet another casualty of the MBA-lead, value extracting management theory.

So in sun, it really doesn’t matter if the CEO is an engineer, but it matters that the CEO is not working with abstractions, and therefore I was making the suggestion that the CEO should be an engineer, or at least come from engineering as a background, so that we do not continue the pattern of incompetent management that has gotten this company to the brink of failure.

Forgive my typos, I had to dictate this as I’m traveling.

I think you describe a much more particular issue with perhaps average(?) US executive eduction and practice where perhaps MBAs are overemphasised.

I disagree that quality is specific to engineering. Lots of other fields understand quality, too.

Manufacturing quality. These are manufacturing problems.