Yeah. Welchian management is garbage from a product perspective - that's just about the most obvious thing in the universe - but the real crap of this is, over the lifetime of the business, it's also garbage from a finance perspective. Go ahead and take a tour of the companies that went whole-hog on Welchian initiatives. Assuming you can find one that still exists, show me one that's unequivocally making money today.
Welchian management is just another spin on the old "restaurant fire" mafia scheme: bank up debt on assets before selling the plumbing and torching the place. Like the mob, it makes a handful of cash for some random top guy, and absolutely wrecks everything else, forever.
It's hard to not take stories like this personally, having spent time inside the Boeing mothership. The power of this organization to destroy value rivals that of a small-ish military occupation; the ability of Boeing to do anything meaningful in an engineering context is pretty obviously at an end[1]. It's a testament to past cleverness - and to the knowledge and dedication of line workers, maintenance, and aircrew - that any legacy Boeing product ever works, at all, ever. And that's why we're now fixing deficiencies like this in goddamn flight checklists. Because it's all that's left.
[1] Whatever innovation leaks from the company today is wholly from acquisitions, and those always have all cash choked from their lifeless corpses within five or ten years. Even DoD procurement has put a big red flag on the Boeing RFPs that come in, although that's also related to their increasing inability to estimate costs better than RANDINT.
Boeing was one of the most innovative companies and took major risks to move the state of air travel forward (747 etc.) and that basically came to a standstill after the spreadsheet and finance people took over.
> took major risks to move the state of air travel forward (747 etc.)
That's a very bad example. Boeing failed with the 2707 supersonic transporter because federal funding was cut, and assuming that they'll be left behind by the obvious future of supersonic passenger transportation with the Concorde and the Tu-144, decided to make a plane filling other niches that were going to be left. Like cargo, which wasn't going to need the speed, but needed capacity. The 747 was a dual use cargo and passenger design.
