Asset seizure and jail time work wonders, too bad they're not being used.
This happens all the time, everywhere. I think of “good company culture” as a temporary, unstable situation. Any movement away from that position will accelerate towards failure.
The entire system is not necessarily engineered to avoid accountability, but the system encourages people to figure out a way to avoid accountability, and so you end up with this.
As another example, take a look at clothing companies which use child labor to produce cheap clothing. The companies don’t directly employ the children, but they use a chain of contractors and subcontractors. Each layer in the chain makes it more likely that leadership is unaware of ground truth, and with this many links in the chain, a top-level directive to cut costs will inevitably end up with something like child labor at the bottom, because it’s cheap. If you get bad press coverage for it, you look to assign blame to a specific link in the chain, fire that contractor, and then rehire someone else (but the chain repairs itself around the missing link and you end up with the same child laborers working for you).
Systems are usually to blame more than people are.
IDK, honestly. Systems are created by people who think or ought to think about the incentives they are setting. But in the end, the lower echelons are still "just following orders" by employing child labourers or pushing out a plane with a crippled design.
I don't know about US companies, but I think most big enterprises have an internal whistleblower system, that can and should be used if unethical decisions are pushed down.
You can think all you want, but the system is larger and more complicated than you are. You might as well ask a gear to think about the engine.
The system has, in it, people who are smarter than you. You can’t hope to understand all the implications of incentives you create in a system.
> But in the end, the lower echelons are still "just following orders" by employing child labourers or pushing out a plane with a crippled design.
I feel that a statement leading with “in the end” is too reductionist. These are complicated problems, and pointing fingers is too simple a tool to solve them.
The system is set up so that you can blame the people who hired child laborers, fire them, replace them, and still end up with the same child laborers making the same clothes in the same factory. Same with Boeing—no matter who you point fingers at with the 737 MAX, you can fire those people and rehire new ones but the disaster will happen again as long as the system encourages it.
It's very easy to see that the wrong decision was made in this case, but this is just one of thousands (or more) that were made in this program; much less the company as a whole.
So while this was definitely bad, it's much simpler to say "this decision was bad and you shouldn't done this" than it is to say "you shouldn't make bad decisions"