Boeing, Quality, and Experience

“John Barnett, who raced cars in his spare time and seemed ‘high on life’ according to one former colleague, was a ‘great, fun boss that loved Boeing and was willing to share his knowledge with everyone,’ as one of his former quality technicians would later recall”

Barnett “was mired in an institution that was in a perpetual state of unlearning all the lessons it had absorbed over a 90-year ascent to the pinnacle of global manufacturing”

“Like most neoliberal institutions, Boeing had come under the spell of a seductive new theory of ‘knowledge’ that essentially reduced the whole concept to a combination of intellectual property, trade secrets, and data, discarding ‘thought’ and ‘understanding’ and ‘complex reasoning’ possessed by a skilled and experienced workforce as essentially not worth the increased health care costs”

“CEO Jim McNerney, who joined Boeing in 2005, had last helmed 3M, where management as he saw it had ‘overvalued experience and undervalued leadership’ before he purged the veterans into early retirement”

“He initially refused to let nearly any of these talented assholes work on the 787 Dreamliner, instead outsourcing the vast majority of the development and engineering design of the brand-new, revolutionary wide-body jet to suppliers, many of which lacked engineering departments”

“In 2009, Boeing began recruiting managers from Washington state to move east to the supplier’s non-union plant in Charleston, South Carolina, to train the workforce to properly put together a plane”

“The bosses hit [Barnett] with a new initiative called ‘Multi-Function Process Performer,’ through which quality inspectors were directed to outsource 90 percent of their duties to the mechanics they were supposed to be supervising”

“[Barnett] believed relying on mechanics to self-inspect their work was not only insane but illegal under the Federal Aviation Administration charter, which explicitly required quality inspectors to document all defects detected, work performed, and parts installed on a commercial airplane in one centralized database”

“[Barnett] calculated that it would be a bigger pain for Boeing to fire him for doing the right thing than following orders, so he kept his head down and continued managing his inspectors as though he were back in Everett, taking special care to meticulously record every episode of noncompliance (and nonconformance, which is similar but not identical) he encountered”

“While the criminal probe ultimately shriveled into one of the most pathetic plea bargains in the history of American justice, something shifted within the FAA. Boeing had quietly assumed many of the roles traditionally played by its primary regulator, an arrangement that was ethically absurd, though in practice it probably worked better than being regulated by an agency full of underpaid bureaucrats desperate to ingratiate themselves to Boeing”

“‘For every new plane you put up into the sky there are about 20,000 problems you need to solve, and for a long time we used to say Boeing’s core competency was piling people and money on top of a problem until they crushed it,’ says Stan Sorscher, a longtime Boeing physicist and former officer of the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (SPEEA), the labor union representing Boeing engineers. But those people are gone”

“Sorscher has warned Boeing management for decades now of the catastrophic effects of the brain drain inflicted by its war on ‘brilliance’”

“He says McDonnell Douglas managers published a statistical analysis in 1997 gauging productivity against the average seniority of managers across various programs that found that greener workforces were substantially less productive, which he found to be a ‘mirror image’ of a kind of ‘rule of thumb’ within Boeing that held that every Boeing employee takes four years to become ‘fully productive’”

“But the average employee assigned to the 737 program has been at Boeing just five years, according to a longtime Boeing executive who is involved in various efforts to save the company; for comparison’s sake, he says the average employee assigned to the 777 program had between 15 and 20 years under their belt. The typical engineer or machinist assigned to the task of fixing Boeing’s 20,000 problems has never known a Boeing that wasn’t a five-alarm dumpster fire”

“By now you know what became of [Barnett]: He was found dead a few weeks ago with a gunshot wound to his right temple, ‘apparently’ self-inflicted, on what was meant to be the third day of a three-day deposition in his whistleblower case against his former employer”