Comment by lumost
5 years ago
The implication is that Engineers can manage an engineering product better than a career CEO. There are several examples of turnarounds such as AMD where technical CEO's delivered significant product and ultimately financial wins over organizations run by career managers.
Boeing's choice to pursue the Max vs. a new airframe was entirely motivated by perceived cost benefits and resulted in a flawed and delayed product. Had the decision makers had an aerospace background they may have made different decisions.
I was listening to an interview with AMD's CEO Dr. Lisa Su, and I was surprised at how casually she was using technical terminology while explaining complex industrial process optimization techniques her company was working on.
I was just so used to the top three or four tiers of corporate management having literally no idea what their company's engineering department actually does day to day. Hearing a CEO knowledgeable about their main product line was a bit of a shock.
But it shouldn't be a shock! It should be the norm.
I work for a small IT-only company. If I start using "technical" terms like "IP address" with our CEO, his eyes glaze over...
I've never met a CEO that doesn't understand their main product. Sometimes, the main product isn't what the employees and engineers think it is. Sometimes that product is the company itself.
> "Sometimes that product is the company itself."
I suspect there is a cause and effect relationship here, a CEO with an M&A background will always see the company this way. A CEO with a product background may make the companies customer's/product/team more valuable to an acquirer.
The M&A culture of the 80s was pretty toxic, businesses that financed their own expansion/revamp in lean times were looted for their bank accounts during deep recessions. The "survivors" now run with only a few months in the bank, making the whole economy more dependent on financial liquidity. We'll probably never know whether financially lean enterprises were more capital efficient or just riskier.
The motivation was not perceived cost benefits, but actual costs of their customers. Retraining pilots and qualifying them would have meant new operational costs for airlines operating the 737 Max negating the benefit of the more efficient bigger engines. That pushed Boeing to try to make the Max series fly "like" a regular 737. Problem is that they couldn't hide the fact that crappy software written by $7/hour coders is a poor substitute for an airframe scaled up to match the bigger engine size. Deaths were inevitable when they decided to lie to the pilots about what was actually going on. Done correctly, the software fix could have been workable, but the design of MCAS was piss poor.
The cost of retraining the pilots was something that's been shouldered dozens of times in the past. I'd imagine that an Engineering CEO making a bold bet that software could avoid the retraining need would have been both more ambitious and smarter about the change. Why not build the right airframe and give the plane flight modes to emulate the characteristics of various 7xx aircraft that pilots were familiar with?
Good point. I'm truly curious how far up the chain that decision went. Knowing how software gets written, I'd be willing to bet there were quite a few informal discussions about the various trade offs of the possible approaches taken to meet the design requirements.