> 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.