Three out of four of Boeing CEOs of the last 20 years came up under General Electric's Jack Welsch. These people are actively hostile to engineering and seem to think financial markets are the only truth that exist.

One of the former CEOs called engineers who care too much about quality "assholes" because they don't care about the stock price, so he actively made efforts to chase them off. How can you possibly think that the quality of the products and stock price are completely disconnected?

These people really are the Tommy Wiseau of running a business. They kind of know what it looks like, but get so many details wrong and the end result is completely absurd and doesn't work at all, so all you can do is laugh at it.

Businesses have basically two kinds of products : stock and what they say they actually make. The latter is domain-specific; you always would need an in-house expert as a leader to do it well. Selling stock is more general; an MBA from GE can do it effectively for Boeing or any other company. Thus in a world where CEO's hop around companies at the behest of Wall Street, stock promotion will always get more focus than the actual business. The incentives are broken and since Wall Street won't fix it all on it's own, that leaves Congress, which isn't any better.

Aren't stock price 'just' a performance indicator, all thing considered?

Hence, aren't people always talking about improving the stock price just targeting the metrics instead of focusing on the interesting part?

> Aren't stock price 'just' a performance indicator, all thing considered?

That is a hypothesis from the 1990s. Turns out that incentives need to be better aligned over time than what stock prices can manage

Saying that "incentives need to be better aligned" is like saying that the Sun is more than fifty miles up in the sky: (A) it is technically true, and (B) there are people who don't believe it.

More like whatever someone is willing to pay for it. There is correlation with performance, but it's far far from perfect, especially the kind of performance we're talking about here (long-term technical foundations).

People $4,000 for brand-name Whatever™ designer clothes. It's not really worth $4,000 in any real sense, other than what someone is willing to pay for it.

One thing that I see in my industry is replacement of knowledge with rule based systems exacerbated by engineering degree inflation.

Boeing had all the required systems in place. Even 2x the quality systems they needed.

None if this matters if people are playing legal word games with quality requirements instead of basic engineering. Technically following a rule might win in court, but it wont win over physics.

"For financialized business, doing what is says on the sign is only a cover."

Well put. The MBA-isation of America is a cancer.

To be fair, they mention "financial engineering" but your point is fair in that they write of this is as if it was a mistake rather than a result of well-financed operations that would buy companies and squeeze them for assets unless the company drained, subcontracted and so-forth itself.

Yeah, unless one gives a full picture of this environment, that this is how investment works today, all the exposes in the world wind-up just someone crying over their beer about "back in my day, they cared about quality".

Yeah, I was expecting to see the, er, F-Word somewhere around where it said Boeing "slowly but very deliberately extracted itself from the business of making planes."

Damn frickin' straight man. Remember that scene in The Founder? "You're not going to run a hamburger business. You're going to run a real estate scheme that happens to sell hamburgers". With the Welchians, they've distilled it down to very nearly its apotheosis: the old Mob trick of insuring a restaurant, selling it down to the plumbing for cash, and then burning the joint to the ground.

Buyin' you a drink.