>> GE [1]? Boeing [2] [3]? The stocks go up because management and shareholders pull forward the gains as financialization destroys the long term value of the enterprises. Works until it doesn't.
> Boeing consistently went up for many decades prior to the MAX crisis. So did GE.
The point is they could have probably kept going up if they hadn't done that.
It's like how if you choose to eat your seed corn, you'll be fat and happy for a season, then you and your family will certainly starve to death next year. You'd most likely had lived if you hadn't made that short-term decision.
> Companies have life cycles. They grow until they become unable to function efficiently anymore, then they go down.
And how often are the "life cycles" really just the accumulation of bad short-term decisions catching up with the company?
You can kludge and kludge and kludge, but eventually that makes the app unmaintainable. Then you're in "total rewrite" or go under territory.
> It's like how if you choose to eat your seed corn, you'll be fat and happy for a season, then you and your family will certainly starve to death next year. You'd most likely had lived if you hadn't made that short-term decision.
Part of that is probably embedded in the environment. The market favors risk-taking. Everyone is dipping into their seed corn, hoping they can use the extra energy they have now to secure some new corn and cover for the surplus. Sometimes they can't, and they starve. More importantly though, anyone who didn't dip into their seed corn is no longer there - risking a bit gives you a competitive advantage over those who risk less.
This dynamics plays at multiple levels in large companies, and arguably is deeply embedded in the overall business culture.
It's not totally irrational either - "eating your seed corn" sounds stupid in isolation, but the calculus changes when every village around you is at war with you and everyone else, all while the whole region gets hammered by natural disasters. Saving the seed corn to survive the next year may end up killing you next week.
>And how often are the "life cycles" really just the accumulation of bad short-term decisions catching up with the company?
I do think technical debt is a real problem, but to play devils advocate, the “life-cycle” is often a pivot from “innovation” to “maintenance”. Companies rightly begin to focus on the aspects of business that make them money and will often cannibalize R&D to focus on high-margin areas. That’s why “mature” companies often focus on innovation via acquisition.
Perhaps that's the trick to longevity then, not seeking endless growth. All the oldest companies on earth seem to small, geographically contained entities (e.g., hotels, restaurants) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies
> No company goes up forever. They all eventually strangle themselves with bureaucratic inefficiency.
So they should act to strangle themselves faster? It feels like your reasoning is equivalent to, "Eventually you'll die, so there's no point taking care of your health. Go save money by avoiding the doctor, take up smoking, and eat junk food all the time."
Being relentlessly focused on the short term will do that, eventually.
You seem to think the assumption "all companies die" means you can simplify away their journey, but it matters if they get there faster or slower (at least to society, if not the decision-makers to maximize their personal profit while hoping to not being the ones left holding the bag).
> Old companies die and new ones take their place. This is not a problem for society. In most cases creative destruction is a net positive.
That's what they say, but I don't think it's true (at the high end, at least). For instance: if Boeing dies, the market will not replace it. It'll be an Airbus monopoly for large jets, and maybe the the communists will eventually build a competitor (Comac). IIRC, it's too expesnive for Embraer to make the jump into that market.
...which is why the market is supposed to have competition. Company strangles themselves with bureaucracy -> next company is ready to take over. But when a monopoly strangles itself with bureaucracy, there is no next company to take over and you get rent-seeking behaviour and unmotivated employees that just phone it in because they have nowhere else to go. End result: the public foots the bill for less quality at higher prices.
The book on GE is specifically about how they lied, cheated, and committed fraud -- er, accounting irregularities -- for decades, in order to maintain the illusion of number goes up predictably.
In retrospect, it was exactly as unlikely as Madoff's numbers.
But ALL of the FANGs pride themselves on predictably rising numbers. They all have a semi-believable story, and in fact only Amazon has a unique tactic (which is cheating taxes entirely by having zero profit, hence their revenue goes up predictably instead of profit. The others have steadily rising profit with slight variation in the rise of their revenue)
But all of them do it. Facebook/Meta, Amazon, Netflix, Google, Apple. Even the non-FANG fangs like Tesla, Twitter, ... and all have stories about faking it. Most are advertising and that's easy to fake on both sides (buy your own adertising, and of course fake engagement), Amazon has zero profit so they proudly declare they're faking it for the government (but, of course, they're not cheating you), Netflix has steadily rising subscriber numbers where everyone else has failed, even Apple's growth has switched to subscriber growth, the part of their business that would be the easiest to fake.
In fact this is quite common in the whole S&P 500, including outside of the US, with numbers not quite as dramatic as the FANGs, but still going up.
> Companies have life cycles. They grow until they become unable to function efficiently anymore, then they go down.
> It's not about prioritizing short term results.
Why did they need to grow in the first place though? If a company is already profitable, and growing will end up making them less functional and eventually erode profits, that sounds like it's due to prioritizing short-term results over long-term stable profits.
Boeing was forced by courts bolster safety, compliance, and quality programs as well as admitting to conspiracy to thwart FAA oversight. I don’t know about you, but my experience is that when companies undermine those types of oversight, it’s almost always due to schedule and price pressure (ie short term results). (Not to mention, the whole impetus for MCAS was to rush the design to market so they wouldn’t lose out on AA as a customer).
Again, the vast bulk of Boeing's history was before that.
> the whole impetus for MCAS was to rush the design to market so they wouldn’t lose out on AA as a customer
The impetus for MCAS was to make the MAX behave like the previous 737 model to reduce the expense of retraining the pilots.
In general, flying is safer when pilots do not need to "code switch" when switching airplane models. Many crashes result from a pilot reflexively doing the right thing for the previous airplane they flew, rather than the one they are flying at the moment.
>Again, the vast bulk of Boeing's history was before that.
I’m not sure what you intend to convey with this statement. If price reflects reality, the current price should reflect the current reality, no? Whether the White Sox were the best team 100 years ago has little bearing on my prediction about their chances this year. I fail to see how Boeing’s prior culture prevents them from succumbing to short term incentives. I know your point is the downfall is a bureaucratic one, but the evidence does not point to that (they actually cut corners on bureaucratic requirements).
>The impetus for MCAS was to make the MAX behave like the previous 737 model to reduce the expense of retraining the pilots.
Go deeper. Why was this considered necessary?
(Hint: it’s because they wanted to rush the design to market with a less expensive (and lower quality) product. Ie cost and schedule pressure. You stopped at the proximate cause.)
Companies have life cycles. They grow until they become unable to function efficiently anymore, then they go down.
It's not about prioritizing short term results.