<story><title>Boeing&apos;s Managerial Revolution Created the 737 Max Disaster</title><url>https://newrepublic.com/article/154944/boeing-737-max-investigation-indonesia-lion-air-ethiopian-airlines-managerial-revolution</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ineedasername</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&amp;gt; Everybody thinks his business is different, because everybody is the same. Nobody. Is. Different. [from a wall street analyst about Boeing]&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;This in a nutshell represents the core failure of modern managerial thinking. What started as &amp;quot;scientific management&amp;quot; many decades ago, an attempt to systematically understand how corporations should operate, quickly evolved into a group think belief that management could function as fungible &amp;amp; completely replaceable units of work-- that a &amp;quot;manager&amp;quot; could be trained up in various basic principles and plugged into any role&lt;p&gt;There are of course commonalities across businesses, and commonalities across managers for necessary skill, but each business is, in some core, fundamental way, &lt;i&gt;different&lt;/i&gt; from others. Good management of a company doesn&amp;#x27;t following a paint-by-numbers rule book, it requires deep understanding of the particulars of &lt;i&gt;that&lt;/i&gt; business, the market &amp;amp; industry it operates in.&lt;p&gt;I think this is changing, slowly, but the legacy of this flawed thinking is a long one.</text></comment>
<story><title>Boeing&apos;s Managerial Revolution Created the 737 Max Disaster</title><url>https://newrepublic.com/article/154944/boeing-737-max-investigation-indonesia-lion-air-ethiopian-airlines-managerial-revolution</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ssivark</author><text>Couldn&amp;#x27;t resist posting this excerpt:&lt;p&gt;---&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;And while Boeing’s engineers toiled to get McDonnell’s lemon planes into the sky, their own hopes of designing a new plane to compete with Airbus, Boeing’s only global market rival, were shriveling. Under the sway of all the naysayers who had called out the folly of the McDonnell deal, the board had adopted a hard-line “never again” posture toward ambitious new planes. Boeing’s leaders began crying “crocodile tears,” Sorscher claimed, about the development costs of 1995’s 777, even though some industry insiders estimate that it became the most profitable plane of all time. The premise behind this complaining was silly, Sorscher contended in PowerPoint presentations and a Harvard Business School-style case study on the topic. A return to the “problem-solving” culture and managerial structure of yore, he explained over and over again to anyone who would listen, was the only sensible way to generate shareholder value. But when he brought that message on the road, he rarely elicited much more than an eye roll. “I’m not buying it,” was a common response. Occasionally, though, someone in the audience was outright mean, like the Wall Street analyst who cut him off mid-sentence: &lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;“Look, I get it. What you’re telling me is that your business is different. That you’re special. Well, listen: Everybody thinks his business is different, because everybody is the same. Nobody. Is. Different.” &lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;And indeed, that would appear to be the real moral of this story: Airplane manufacturing is no different from mortgage lending or insulin distribution or make-believe blood analyzing software—another cash cow for the one percent, bound inexorably for the slaughterhouse.&lt;/i&gt;</text></comment>