Those of us in the operations sides of buisnesses or doing research at universities really only see all the terrible hurtfull decisions these MBAs are making. Constant cost cutting and understaffing tend to lead to a lot of built up resentment. Maybe it is just a few bad eggs spoiling the broth, but to operations people it looks like the whole organisation is out to make their lives miserable.

I feel this.

Tim Cook is also an industrial engineer, and this is easily available information.

My point is more that you don’t want people focused on business and profits instead of people who have deep knowledge in the area and passion for the product.

Accountants and business majors are better at managing insurance companies, banks, etc, because they understand the space. Engineers are better at managing engineering companies for the same reason.

Tim Cook has a bachelor engineering degree but he hasn't been involved in engineering work since the 90s. He's been the head of operations, making business decisions like closing down factories and outsourcing production, since his days at IBM. He is a supply chain wonk, which is why he got an MBA (supply chain management is a core part of business school teachings). This is also easily available information. Cook has been "focused on business and profits" for decades, and yet you act like he is an example of a great "engineer" in charge.

Believe it or not, managing the supply chain is a specialty of industrial engineering.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_engineering#Sub-dis...

>Although it has the same goals as supply chain engineering, supply chain management is focused on a more traditional management and business based approach

gasp, there's that evil "business" word again

I've always been impressed with production engineers, cause they always find a way to explain to us (software/electric/electronic engineers) the issues with the marketing/commercial/supply chain side and explain to the executives/MBAs that, no, adding 10 people to a 5 people team won't make the team go 3 time faster. In big consortiums projects they are pretty much a glue imho.

Having a production engineer as an exec is probably the best way to run a successful team if you project involve multiple field of knowledge (as Apple probably does).

Tim Cooks understand tradeoffs, and this understanding should be expected of any top exec. Is it often the case?

Once upon I time I worked in a process engineering gig. Literally every problem started by trying to explain no, just adding more people to a bad process won’t magically fix things. And yet, that was always the knee-jerk reaction to those owning the process. I think it’s because a bad process has the people constantly reactively fire-fighting they naturally feel short-handed

You need both. I've worked at places that were all subject-matter and no business expertise. Companies like that fail.

> My point is more that you don’t want people focused on business and profits instead of people who have deep knowledge in the area and passion for the product.

But isn't focusing on business and profits also focusing on safety of your products since you want to make sure your planes don't crash and passengers come to their destination alive and unharmed.

(1) what is the timeframe you look at? (I want LOTS of money THIS year, because I NEED a yacht THIS year to have a party with celebrities. How do you convince person like me to invest money in developing safety solutions?)

(2) profit = selling price - production\development cost - expected downsides of accidents(penalties, tarnished image). "Expected downsides of accidents" can be reduced by reducing risk, but also in some other creative ways (blackmailing, lobying, promoting the right candidate, marketing, rebranding, migrating to different markets, insurance, coverups. And lets not forget deals with friends: If I can win 5billion, I can allow my self to split it 100 ways and still end up with a nice big yacht).

> But isn't focusing on business and profits also focusing on safety of your products ...

In practical terms, it doesn't appear to work out that way.

The culture of company is much more than its CEO though. And it's the culture of Boeing that changed from an engineering culture to a profit-driven culture. This shift is pretty well-documented. It occurred with Boeing’s reverse takeover of McDonnell Douglas in the late 1990s. This new direction was in no small part the influence of McDonnell Douglas CEO Harry Stonecipher. The following are good reads on what exactly happened:

https://newrepublic.com/article/154944/boeing-737-max-invest...

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/how-boeing...

The Max was developed under James McNerney who is an MBA with no engineering background.

The max was developed and launched by Dennis Muilenberg. Muilenberg was President and then CEO of Boeing for 7 of the 8 years that the MAX was under development and launch. McNerney was only there for 4 of those years.

You can argue all you want about who shoulders more responsibility, but Muilenberg was an executive throughout the entire program, and more importantly, was the CEO who oversaw the decision for the certification of the MAX prior to first flight, which was the critically faulty decision.

Miulenberg became CEO in July 2015. The 737 MAX went into production in 2014 and had its first flight in January 2016.

Muilenberg became president in 2013, and the 737 MAX certifications happened in 2017, when Muilenberg was CEO.

For large aerospace projects, the critical decisions are made years before first flight, and most often even years before experimental production start. Judging from the timeline Mullenberg clearly inherited the messy decisions from his predecessor.

Though of course he would have had the knowledge to understand something didn’t smell quite right after. Whether he had the sole authority to order a delay or redesign in the intervening time is questionable. It may have been that he couldn’t wrangle enough support from the board to do something dramatic.

Exactly. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, YouTube are all led by these MBAs and seem to be doing just fine.

If Boeing's products went down that frequently, I wouldn't fly.