This trope that anyone who is not a manager is Good and anyone who is a manager is Bad rubs me the wrong way.

The reality is often a lot more complex and nuanced.

Most of the time, workers and managers are smart, well-meaning, and hard-working. Even executives (though as you get higher and higher up, you see more and more people whose qualification is political skills and not expertise).

The issue with Boeing is less any individual and more institutional decay. Over time, a spigot of effectively unconditional cash corrupts an organization, especially once anyone with enough internal weight to fight against it is no longer involved in the day-to-day. Give it 20 years, and SpaceX will be the same way.

> Most of the time, workers and managers are smart, well-meaning, and hard-working.

This has not been true at any job I’ve had, from working in fast food as a teenager to now being a data scientist. What you describe would be exceptional in almost any company, where things otherwise regress to the mean of these various aspects, or, in especially bad circumstances, go south of that. Boeing would seem to be in the latter category at this point.

It doesn’t have to be this way. A visionary leader at the top can prevent decay over decades (see Apple, Nvidia)

Visionary leaders do sometimes work I guess.

But among other things they are subject to the dictator trap, and of course they have a best before date.

So a visionary leader is a good person to have during bootstrap, but then your processes need to become self-sustaining.

Neither Nvidia nor Apple have access to a spigot of unconditional cash. Their customers are quite discerning and have alternatives they could switch to.

And yet once that leader is gone, the rot sets in. See Apple. Twice.

Succession remains an unsolved problem. Seemingly.

I hope to be alive long enough to see how Toyota's story plays out. They seemed to have lost their way under Akio Toyoda. We'll see if Koji Sato can get them back on track.

I'm also keenly interested in Haier and its "Rendanheyi model". They're worthy of HBR style case studies, receiving at least as much attention as Apple, Sony, Honda, Toyota, etc. And yet we know so little about them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haier

In 2021, Liang Haishan succeeded Haier's legendary CEO Zhang Ruimin. What happens next? Continued success? Long slow decline? Jump into a volcano?

I'd love to know.

> See Apple. Twice.

Apple is one of the halves of the phone duopoly sadly, so it will take a long time for them to pay for Cook's decisions this time.

It could be individual incompetence as well, why discount that and thumb our ears?

Every organization will have incompetent individuals. A healthy organization is able to remove them; a typical one will blunt their effects; and an unhealthy one will allow them to reproduce themselves and seize power.

We want it all to be a matter of just one or two incompetent individuals, because then the solution is simple. We just need to be aware that incompetent individuals exist, and through sheer force of will we can prevent them from destroying great things! But a much darker possibility is that it's something inherent to complex systems. Then, there's nothing to do to escape the inevitable cycle. Whatever brilliant schemes we come up with are doomed to failure, because the issue isn't individuals being stupid but institutional incapability to repair itself.

Because while the issues are serious and many, Boeing is still making extremely safe and working airplanes. It's impressive and shows that in general, things are going right. It doesn't excuse the decay and issues, but this isn't a case where everything they do is faulty. they're just held to an extremely high bar.

> Boeing is still making extremely safe and working airplanes. It's impressive and shows that in general, things are going right.

<cough> 737MAX

> It doesn't excuse the decay and issues, but this isn't a case where everything they do is faulty. they're just held to an extremely high bar.

... only to the bar they set themselves with the older 737s?

This is obviously something we are going to need to solve if we want to advance further as a society.

I really want to know about studies being done in this area.

Manager's entire job is to provide the organizational support and navigate the organizational challenges to allow the non-manager employees the space to do their job. When we talk about systemic organizational failures, managers are the ones that own that problem and are accountable for the failures.

Sure, on an individual basis, you have pockets of amazing managers that can't overcome organizational inertia. I feel for them as well, but when organizational failures come into play, I'm certainly taking more pity on the employees then the managers.

The problem is management sets the core rules and incentives. And no matter how competent and motivated you are, at some point you either move along or stop caring.

There are bad employees but they have less influence over the company overall.

"Management" is short hand for the Jack Welch wannabe MBA try hards. Not middle management.

From my limited experience with megacorps, and lots of reading, persons Director level and up are bat guano insane. Execs live in their own separate Machiavellian fantasy world bubble. Any nod to reality (eg rocket go boom) is a selfown for corporate ladder climbers.

Any productive work at an org like Boeing, post infection by MD's leeches, is in despite of "managagement"'s best efforts.

Managers are responsible for what they manage. If something goes wrong, either management caused it, or failed to prevent it.

It's possible for the underlings to be good despite bad management, but if the underlings are bad that is again a consequence of poor management.

The only exception would be deliberate sabotage, which is not unknown but incredibly rare.

I don't think the comment you replied to implies such a black and white distinction. Is it so absurd to suggest that some of the people working on Starliner actually cared, and did the best work they could?

Managers too, though ultimately this failure must come down to management at some (presumably high) level.

> This trope that anyone who is not a manager is Good and anyone who is a manager is Bad rubs me the wrong way.

It should rub you the wrong way. It denies both the agency and the moral obligation of the professionals working under the managers.

Except that's capitalism for you. The profit motive means only those willing to put profit (and often very short term profit) ahead of everything else means that only unempathetic assholes (and often psychopaths) end up as leaders of these organisations.

So not everyone who is not a manager is good, but almost all top-level managers are bad. They need to be in order to make the decisions needed to advance short term profit before all else.

s/some/most/

engineers on the bottom don't care about the politics. they design and implement the best they can.

This isn’t any better. Are you an IC? All you’re probably saying is, “the people that I work with more directly, that share the same organisational context as me, that I personally can relate to, etc are good, and the other ones aren’t”.