Quality is an engineering attribute: a byproduct of a culture that by definition survives in a company despite profit drive by putting minimum standards and support for people who keep them before or in balance with the bottom line concerns. Quality isn’t a culture, it’s literally a product engineering concerns that get prioritized.

The old school management theory is that engineering leaders are accountable to shipping quality products on time and within budget. That’s it.

But a CEO's historical understanding of engineering operations has been pretty opaque: ships on time, or doesn't. Of course this is lacking everything meaningful about software.

So the same visionary management theory has come up with a concept of DORA metrics. This provides the competency with quality management metrics that allow for decision-making around whether engineering is delivering or not and a whole new level of understanding and abstraction.

But understand that most of the companies that are getting themselves in deep shit right now are doing so because they have removed power from their engineering organizations to the point where, and the service of relentless extraction of shareholder value, they have destroyed their companies and crippled their products. It is happened to quite a few companies and manufacturers in the United States, from GE to Boeing, and from IBM to GM.

The current profit comes from revenue not reputation culture thinks that you can build some level of abstraction to engineering management, and then layer on traditional management theory in order to extract value from a chain of command.

The truth is that engineering lead organizations deliver a great deal, more value to shareholders in the long-term, as they are more focused on building the platforms that create competitive long-term foundations. Companies like Netflix, Google, Apple, and other “tech companies” occupy the top value of the stock market in equities positions around the world, because of the fact that they are able to use software to amplify the value of their innovations at profound levels. But America’s Legacy companies continue to operate as if this lesson is not true they continue to prioritize optimization over platform.

The old system continues to persist with the idea that there must be a professional manager at the top of the organization, rather than someone who is focused on creating value with platforms, and the culture tends to produce these situations of crisis in exploitation, because they do not understand how important it is to create a culture of platform value creation.

So of course, I make the comment that we should have an “engineering experience CEO,” or even an actual engineer in the CEO seat, and predictably it ends up being criticized for the fact that we could have a professional manager in that seat, and don’t actually need an engineer to be a CEO. That’s fine, and I can understand the point you’re raising.

But, it’s been my experience that CEOs that have been in involved in platform, engineering and large scale systems management do a much better job of preserving the culture that creates lasting and durable platform value for companies like Boeing, and this is the value which has been destroyed and the culture which must be resurrected before the company crashes.

So, rather than bringing another abstraction specialist, who will find another metric values system to manage things, which isn’t working, I was suggesting that we should bring in an actual engineer to sleep on the factory floor and make sure that this culture stops before someone dies and the share price drops to unrecoverable levels (where it’s going!).

To expound I’ll say this.

The current culture at Boeing is very much a culture where the engineers don’t speak up. Many of the most passionate people who worked there have been fired or let go because they spoke up so, I think it’s time for a change before one of the most storied and important companies in American history becomes yet another casualty of the MBA-lead, value extracting management theory.

So in sun, it really doesn’t matter if the CEO is an engineer, but it matters that the CEO is not working with abstractions, and therefore I was making the suggestion that the CEO should be an engineer, or at least come from engineering as a background, so that we do not continue the pattern of incompetent management that has gotten this company to the brink of failure.

Forgive my typos, I had to dictate this as I’m traveling.