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A comment on Boeing charged with 737 Max fraud conspiracy and agrees to pay over $2.5B. Parent comment

Re:Boeing charged with 737 Max fraud conspiracy and agrees t... by jiggawatts on Thursday January 07, 2021 @06:18PM (#25679035)
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...

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Re:Boeing charged with 737 Max fraud conspiracy and agrees t... by indymike on Thursday January 07, 2021 @06:55PM (#25679404)
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.
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Re:Boeing charged with 737 Max fraud conspiracy and agrees t... by lumost on Friday January 08, 2021 @10:12AM (#25685422)
> "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.

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