[vegetablepotpie]

Although that happened over 50 years ago, and we can’t make the same exact designs, the physics is the same and well understood. Technology has evolved, and has given us more tools. Similar cultures can be made again that support that kind of work.

What’s missing is we need better cultures. I’ve been in engineering cultures that are dominated by management desires to cut costs and deliver on schedule. Engineering excellence is never considered valuable, but it will be the only thing that makes you successful.

Boeing lost its culture of engineering excellence

> “Prince Jim”—as some long-timers used to call him—repeatedly invoked a slur for longtime engineers and skilled machinists in the obligatory vanity “leadership” book he co-wrote. Those who cared too much about the integrity of the planes and not enough about the stock price were “phenomenally talented assholes,” and he encouraged his deputies to ostracize them into leaving the company.

[1] https://attentiontotheunseen.com/2024/03/29/what-boeing-did-...

[sounds]

Interesting thought. Could there also be the gradual evaporation of the old culture of fear? The 1940s through the 1960s fear of other countries, races, and ideologies?

I wonder if the fear suppressed the natural behavior of Jim McNerney and others, keeping them from sowing division within the company because of the perceived danger from outside?

Here are some other examples, where today these might sound like an excuse for aggressive business behavior, instead of a unifying mantra --

Andy Grove, "Only the paranoid survive"

Dick Cheney, "Principle is okay up to a certain point, but principle doesn't do any good if you lose."

(Yes, yes, he's outing himself as unprincipled; I'm quoting him intentionally since people were still being people all throughout; does this show the larger populace wide zeitgeist?)

John F. Kennedy, "We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard."

I think it's interesting how the same thought can sound different when my mind is set in different contexts.

[lenkite]

That article sheds further light on the whistle blower who was assassinated. Didn't know John Barnett was such a major lightning rod at Boeing, documenting corruption to such an extraordinary extent that he was regularly abused by management and the CEO Jim McNerney. And finally was murdered when he was giving testimony. What a tragedy.