<story><title>‘This Has Been Going on for Years’: Boeing’s Manufacturing Mess</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/business/airlines/boeing-manufacturing-737-max-alaska-door-plug-spirit-18f7e233</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gumby</author><text>This point (I put it in italics) should be discussed more:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; At the time, then-Boeing executive Alan Mulally said &lt;i&gt;selling the factory to a private-equity firm&lt;/i&gt; would let Boeing focus on final assembly, where it could add the most value to its airplanes.&lt;p&gt;By now I think we’ve learned that products made in factories owned by PE firms should carry warning labels.  They are proactively anti-quality organizations, focused on extracting the maximum cash out in the short term at the cost of long term value.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>renegade-otter</author><text>But this is not just PE - this is the Jack Welch school of business. Ascend to the top of the company, attach to it like a parasite, and suck it dry over time.&lt;p&gt;Short to mid term, &amp;quot;woah, the stock is going up, this guy is a genius!&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Until there is no more company left to juice the shares with buybacks. This is how the GE engineering culture was destroyed as well.&lt;p&gt;Private Equity is like that, only much accelerated. There is no pretense of &amp;quot;management&amp;quot;.</text></comment>
<story><title>‘This Has Been Going on for Years’: Boeing’s Manufacturing Mess</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/business/airlines/boeing-manufacturing-737-max-alaska-door-plug-spirit-18f7e233</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gumby</author><text>This point (I put it in italics) should be discussed more:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; At the time, then-Boeing executive Alan Mulally said &lt;i&gt;selling the factory to a private-equity firm&lt;/i&gt; would let Boeing focus on final assembly, where it could add the most value to its airplanes.&lt;p&gt;By now I think we’ve learned that products made in factories owned by PE firms should carry warning labels.  They are proactively anti-quality organizations, focused on extracting the maximum cash out in the short term at the cost of long term value.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>MBCook</author><text>I wonder if we’ll ever get the guts to outlaw PE somehow, or at least make it so unprofitable it’s very rare.&lt;p&gt;Nothing good ever seems to come from it, despite their claims.</text></comment>