Boeing should move the its HQ back to Washington state. They need to show the public that things are going to change and it starts with the executive team being next to the engineers. Microsoft had the same problem when Balmer was in charge, focus around sales and not engineering.
> Boeing should move the its HQ back to Washington state...Microsoft had the same problem when Balmer was in charge, focus around sales and not engineering.
While Balmer was CEO the HQ was in Washington state :-)
More seriously, Balmer is an excellent example, because I believe the Boeing case is more mendacious, yet more banal.
Balmer seemed to have the right idea, yet utterly the wrong intuition. It's especially strange in that he was there pretty much from the very beginning, and influenced the growth of the business, yet fatally he never learned what the business actually was.
When Balmer took over MS, the business rested on several pillars:
1 - A captive client base based on CIOs and IT departments
2 - A dedicated and committed employee base
3 - A huge army of outside developers who benefited when MS succeeded, so helped the latter happen.
4 - A consumer business ultimately driven by the size of #1
He was over focused on #1 (in the classic "The Innovator's Dilemma" style) which is why the iphone not only nuked their phone business but opened up a BYOD movement which eroded IT's power (ironically Apple had done the same with the Apple II+Visicalc, which Microsoft shrewedly took advantage of and rode to domination...while Balmer was there).
2 - Picayune things like replacing free snacks with vending machines told the staff that he didn't give a shit about them, rather thought of them simply like a resource.
You can see from the "developers developers developers" video that he really did value #3, and much as I dislike him as a businessman I loved him for that. But eventually it became clear he understood its importance to the business but didn't understand why.
4 - this pillar flailed due to neglect under him, including Xbox, Skype etc.
He grew up with the car business, but grew up when the industry was in the shitter, surviving on momentum, and got his MBA in the intellectually (in regards to business) terrible 1970s. He appears to have learned nothing from his long time at MS before becoming CEO and ran the business like a shitty 1970s car company.
Note that the US car industry only got its act together after 1 - getting their clock cleaned and 2 - going back having gearheads as CEOs.
The Boeing case is similar, but worse. I never believed that Ballmer was subject to lazy or misaligned incentives; he was simply wrongheaded. I do thing the MCDD guys who took over Boeing were incentivised by their comp plans to optimize for the wrong things, all in the short term. The same thing destroyed HP.
> fatally he never learned what the business actually was
What I find fascinating about this post is that it mirrors the same behavior I saw in a small tech company of < 10 employees after the founder sold it to a small group of investors.
Amazing to see a $1M company (1990's dollars) making the same mistakes as a multi-$Bn one.
