Boeing's Managerial Revolution Created the 737 Max Disaster
<i>&gt; Everybody thinks his business is different, because everybody is the same. Nobody. Is. Different. [from a wall street analyst about Boeing]</i><p>This in a nutshell represents the core failure of modern managerial thinking. What started as &quot;scientific management&quot; many decades ago, an attempt to systematically understand how corporations should operate, quickly evolved into a group think belief that management could function as fungible &amp; completely replaceable units of work-- that a &quot;manager&quot; could be trained up in various basic principles and plugged into any role<p>There are of course commonalities across businesses, and commonalities across managers for necessary skill, but each business is, in some core, fundamental way, <i>different</i> from others. Good management of a company doesn&#x27;t following a paint-by-numbers rule book, it requires deep understanding of the particulars of <i>that</i> business, the market &amp; industry it operates in.<p>I think this is changing, slowly, but the legacy of this flawed thinking is a long one.