Thread regarding Boeing Co. layoffs

Good luck with that. There's a faction wanting to return to 1776 when old, rich and white ruled and kept minorities as slaves and woman as property. Same as it always was.

The little people are getting tired of Corporate America being in control of everything. I feel the future holds nothing but an uprising.

Sell the offices 100% work from home

Marko Jukic, in a Twitter thread advances a theory that is neat, plausible, and wrong. He correctly points out how the installation of CEOs coming out of finance at storied companies like Boeing, Intel, and Sony, directly led to them adopting policies that were destructive to these companies.

However, he goes wide of the mark in saying that the replacement of engineer CEOs across Corporate America with finance/MBA CEOs
was the cause of their decline.
While that is true in the highly visible examples he cites, the trend to financial cataclysm was well underway by the time he depicts as a turning point, the early 2000s.
And its lead implementer was engineer Jack Welch at General Electric, who from the mid-1980s onward was touted as the pinnacle of modern management.
By the early 1990s, over 40% of GE’s profit came from its financial service arm.
McKinsey was making bank on selling its manufacturing clients to beef up in financial services just like General Electric.
One vogue well underway by then was that major multinational started running their treasury operations as a profit center, which too often led to unhappy outcomes.

A second ginormous driver of the trend to financial cataclysm
was the rise and stunning success of the raiders of the 1980s, rebranded multiple times (leveraged buyout, then private equity,
which admittedly includes other strategies but leveraged buyouts still account for the majority of expenditures).
The 1980s deals consisted overwhelmingly of financial engineering plays.
At that time, there were plenty of over-diversified, undervalued conglomerates. The vogue in American business then was also to
have fat corporate centers, and that was even more true for these companies.
These deals were exercises in financial engineering.
The hard part was the nearly always hostile takeover.
Even after paying a merger premium, the buyers could break up the company and sell the parts for more than the value of the former whole. This process didn’t break down until the buyout artists, in the later 1980s, bought more and more marginal companies with more and more pricey debt.
The leveraged buyout debt losses were masked by the much larger saving & loan crisis. It didn’t hurt that big foreign banks were major customers for the LBO loans, making the mess for US regulators smaller than it would otherwise have been.

Despite the LBO crash, a cadre of academics, with Harvard’s Michael Jensen, flogged the idea, first promulgated by Milton Friedman in a poorly reasoned New York Times op ed, that companies should be run to promote shareholder interests above all others. That flies in the face of their legal status, as residual claimants after all other obligations have been satisfied. Although I cannot prove a negative,
I have read quite a few guides for directors of corporate boards produced by big building law firms, concentrating on Delaware.

which despite Elon Musk’s hisses, is a corporate-friendly jurisdiction.
I found not a single mention of prioritizing shareholder value as a board duty. The implicit prime directive instead was
“Don’t go bankrupt”.

Jensen later recanted his position having seen the damage it did.
But too many people benefited from this ideology for it to go away.

Let’s return to Jack Welch as a case study in how running a company for short-term results started well before the era of financiers and MBAs becoming prevalent as CEOs. One reason Welch was lionized was the supposedly miraculous tightness of GE corporate controls, enabling them to hit their forecasted earnings like clockwork. For such a sprawling company, with exposures in many currencies, that should instead have been seen as a Madoff-adjacent indicator of accounting funny business, even if it was not fraud per se. GE played lots of games with its finance arm to achieve these results, such as additions to and releases from loss reserves and the timing of the recognition of sales from their large venture capital portfolio.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/08/the-death-of-the-engineer-ceo-evidence-that-short-termism-and-financialization-had-become-ascendant.html

Now that Boeing has proven without any doubt, that’s its management’s strategy of maximizing profit and shareholder returns over all else,
is in fact the best way to obliterate a company’s value
along with its reputation.
What sector could they possible sell?

1. All facets of engineering have been degraded to a farcical level.
2. The entire product line, with two exceptions, is antiquated.
3. The workforce is inexperienced and demoralized.

So, what would a company be buying that could enhance their portfolio?
The only thing Boeing would be selling is liability, not opportunity.

The chickens have come home to roost; now they’re going in the pot.

@lzx+1tUwviNA