03-14-2024, 10:47 AM
I don't know if you work for a publicly traded company but this is the way it goes.
Executives aren't generally paying attention to things like quality, employee happiness or retention, or even fitness of purpose.
I just left my employer of 23 years recently and one of the reasons why is because I was told point blank 'we don't want to offer great support to our customers - we want to give them good support'. And I had at least a decade of listening to executive townhalls where the overarching goal was 1) share price and 2) profitability (which is basically the same thing).
This is as much an artifact of the corporate model as anything else. It's very tempting for a corporation to realign its interests to those two points above all others - and they have rings to put in the employees' noses to pull them along. You don't have to be working long for a big corporation before you start getting stock options and profit sharing dangled in front of you.
It's pitched as a way to improve quality and buy-in, but it does the opposite. Most people go along with it because money. But there are still a critical mass of people who aren't motivated by money as much as they're motivated by quality. I guarantee you all that someone at Boeing knew exactly what was going on prior to the first crash. That person may even have tried to bring attention to it. And it's likely some middle manager had a discussion with a VP and they decided the best way forward was to issue a bulletin in 8 point type buried in some other corporate messaging saying 'oh by the way make sure your pilots know that occasionally they'll need to disable this system manually'. Or, maybe Fight Club style, they just ran the numbers and figured out that doing something about it was more expensive than the fallout from not doing something about it, and they didn't.
Managers are trained to think this way. Either that or they only allow sociopaths at higher levels. They have ways of not only not listening, but letting you know in no uncertain terms that if you bring it up you're losing your job. In some corporations, this is the only thing besides Weinstein-style sexual harassment that will get you dismissed.
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