Re: falsifiability

I see no reason to be held back by claims of unfalsifiability. A structural argument doesn't hold water when coming to a conclusion from which the contributing factors are self-evident. I see no reason to throw in the towel that one cannot claim a child will be different from their parents as a result of sexual reproduction. Just as the merger of Boeing and McD yielded a substantially different company that Boeing and McD competing desperately.

Culture, and specifically corporate culture, is not ineffable. I've been the guy who rounds up managers behind closed doors with a list of ills affecting the company culture toward Quality. I've placed my head on the political chopping block and made myself a target for daring to take the whole "mission" thing seriously. Culture is tangible, and directly observable. It is the sum of a company and its constituent part's decisions made, and those specifically not made or even those it simply isn't possible to entertain without becoming untouchable in the eyes of management above.

I've seen "new blood" shipped in on the management/VP level and watched both transformation for the better, and death from within occur. I've been the stick in the mud pushing back, since God as my witness I will not let myself go down in history as a contributing factor to a THERAC-25 or MAX fiasco. You can know culture, you can pivot culture. You can navigate it, map it, describe it, debug it, and even live it. The only ones who can't are the ones who won't or are afraid to.

In modern business thinking, part of the Welchian playbook is to maximize that fear in the heart of the worker of the one who sets the culture; the guy at the top, to make sure that the business is a top-down machine without any pesky influence from either the cogs or middle management. It is what attracts the power hungry to the position. I have yet to meet in person a single example of the executive that sees their company as the living thing it is, and treat it accordingly. I hope one day I might, but I'm not holding my breath.

Point being, I don't accept the claim as substantially unfalsifiable. In fact, I assert that it is the wrong rational tool to apply to the job at hand, and best left for what it is best suited to. Sound scientific pursuit in the context of something reproducible rather than trying to warp the situation at hand onto the Procrustean bed of Popper's work.

Draw a line from every output of an organization, back through the people involved with making it, and I guarantee you the set of outcomes lines up with the priorities set by the people highest on the totem pole, even if they don't realize it, or give it the attention it is due. This is a fundamental fact of how the world works.

Account for the retirement of the old Boeing guard, plus the shift in modern business's attitudes, plus the pedigree of the line of executives over the last 20+ years, and you will have a hard time not seeing how the merger was not complicit/inevitable.

Frankly, I'd be more interested in whether or not the McD merger was a symptom of the shift in sensibilities since the 80's, or if the shift in the business landscape was in part a result of observing an influential industrial sec to go through a series of rapid M&A's.