Boeing is clearly a company in the death spiral stage of institutional decline. It happens to most institutions, unfortunately, and it will probably happen to spacex one day.
That’s why it’s critical to maintain a regulatory environment and supportive infrastructure so that scrappy innovative new competitors can rise up. To do that, the dead standing wood needs to be felled.
Despite Boeing doing an admirable job of falling down on its own, it would probably still be useful to not keep feeding the decay.
I think Boeing is an object lesson in what happens when you have an MBA without an engineering background run a company whose product is cutting edge engineering.
You can’t innovate when you have to justify every cost. That’s not how innovation works, and in Boeing, engineering was a profit center… but leadership thought Boeing was a manufacturing company, and engineering was a cost center.
So,
You cut corners to make manufacturing cheaper, stop innovating, try to fix aerodynamics problems with software, try to pretend like the big changes you made aren’t, underplay the need for training pilots on what are substantially new aircraft because you don’t want to admit they are actually a lot different than the good selling previous models, etc.
All just bean counter shenanigans instead of focusing on what Boeing was actually great at: delivering value through superior engineering.
So, all the engineers that actually wanted to engineer left to do interesting things, and you’re left with the ones that want to do as little as possible, along with the bean counters that want to minimise ‘spensive stuff like actually innovative projects.
At this point it’s almost like a zombie brand, I wouldn’t be surprised to start seeing boeing branded Chinese dollar store crap any day now.
That’s why it’s critical to maintain a regulatory environment and supportive infrastructure so that scrappy innovative new competitors can rise up. To do that, the dead standing wood needs to be felled.
Despite Boeing doing an admirable job of falling down on its own, it would probably still be useful to not keep feeding the decay.