Book Review-The Infidel and the Professor by Dennis C. Rasmussen

I had been curious about David Hume’s life for a long time but had not yet found a biography that appealed to me. I did not know of his relationship with Adam Smith, I had thought of Adam Smith as an intellect who dealt strictly with economic philosophy. This book brought these two great men of intellect in my mind’s eye. It very effectively told the story of two opposites, a gregarious extravert, David Hume with an introvert that wasn’t as engaging on a social front. The book was laid out chronologically, tracing both men’s lives as it evolved from when they first met until Hume’s passing and beyond, detailing every important aspect of their intertwined lives as loyal friends, effective critics, and sounding boards for each other’s philosophical ideas. The story traces the roots of their friendship as diligently as possible since Smith was an infrequent letter writer. The author, Rasmussen, had to piece together the historical narrative with bits of documentation other people’s surviving writing along with writing from their friends and peers, sometimes squeezing out details through tangential correspondences. Hume contributed mightily as he was a prolific letter writer, so his letters to others helped Rasmussen in this regard. It must have taken a tremendous amount of mental gymnastics and conjecturing for Rasmussen to write a compelling of a narrative as he did here. It was especially fascinating to follow the author along as he tried to reconstruct their debates and friendly thrust and parry on their significant works. The depth of the philosophical arguments and the nuances brought forth by the author was impressive. Even as I was trying to read this with a skeptical eye, the author never overreached his narrative and his conjectures as to the original meaning of the authors were well supported and logical in his conclusions. It is fascinating to essentially reconstruct the debates that these men had over their most intimate thoughts and works. The book was not strictly a restatement of their thoughts however, the author did a remarkable job discussing the event of the day and of their lives and how the current events of the day affected their thoughts and their lives. There was a good amount of discussion regarding each of the men’s employment, as tutors to the wealthy and secretaries to politically well-connected diplomats and other government officials. They both eventually settled down to bucolic lives working as professors in their universities, Hume in Edinburgh and Smith in Glasgow. While the discussion of Hume’s famously anti-religious arguments, The Infidel in the book title referred to Hume, versus Smith’s perceived acquiescence to the religious orthodoxy was very revealing in this recounting: the author states that even though Smith was less overt with his questions regarding the religious orthodoxy of the time – it would be difficult to be as overt as Hume in his opposition to the church – he apparently had more points of agreements with Hume than differences, even though he took pains to ameliorated it to avoid being reviled by those other men of letters at the time. Hume had no such compunctions, indeed, he seemed to delight in tweaking the religious in his irreligiosity It cost him dearly as he was denied employment as professor early on. What is fascinating is the description of how they two friends helped each other in sharpening and developing their arguments represented by their written works. The author patiently and painstakingly traced the discussions between the two friends as they composed their philosophical works over their lifetimes. It is a fascinating intellectual history recounted for our sake. The arguments were recreated through citations and expert interpretations, it presented the points of agreements and disagreements closely and in an unadorned fashion. Even though the explanations were sometimes complex, as all philosophical explanations can be, it was never boring. The discussion of Hume’s work wound its way from his less than enthusiastically received A Treatise of Human Nature to the two enquiries: An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals through his Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, and to his most famous work, although it was a work of history rather than philosophy: The History of England, from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688. The narrative of their friendship continued until Hume passed and proceeded beyond that as Smith acted as more or less Hume’s philosophical and literary executor, as he defended his friends’ beliefs after his passing. He did not allow the gossip of the day to distort or misrepresent Hume’s staunch irreligiosity. He made sure that Hume’s brief, but final autobiography, David Hume: My Life, be published posthumously as Hume had wanted. That was a testament to a true friendship, representing a friend as he wanted to be represented. The story presented in this book also did not shortchange Smith. The author took pains to present the entirety of Smith’s works and did not try to sequester his thoughts to his most famous work, The Wealth of Nations, as many others have previously tried to do. The author did well in tracing the thread of Smith’s thought and described how The Theory of Moral Sentiment made The Wealth of Nation possible. Indeed, this book was a revelation to someone like me, a dilettante in philosophy and history, it served as an excellent introduction to the genre and it made my intellectual life so much better.

Engineering Life-The Cancer of the Cost-Cutting Culture

https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/what-will-it-be-boeing-great-airplanes-that-generate-cash-flow-or-great-cash-flow-period/

I am by no means a Boeing insider. I also cannot vouch for the veracity of Stan Sorscher’s conclusions regarding the Boeing culture just from his July 5, 2019 Opinion article in the Seattle Times. I do, however, recognize the plot-line of the story that he is relating as I had lived in a parallel universe while working in the manufacturing world. His story sounds remarkably like the story that I had been a witness to for most of my engineering career, even though the product he was a part of:  manufacturing passenger airplanes, is much more complex than the product I had a part in manufacturing: electric motors. His product is also purely a performance driven product, whereas the vast majority of the product I dealt with had evolved into a commodity product. A very important distinction, but not one that would disqualify the analogy.

Mr. Sorscher wrote the  letter in response to the culture shift at Boeing that eventually led to the raft of non-performance driven decisions which may have caused two of the Boeing 737 Max airplanes to crash, killing 346 people; this  culture shift also seemingly encouraged engineers to cover up the problem rather than work to solve the problems, especially from engineering managers; it also caused the engineers to ignore the most basic tenet of engineering: getting it right because of cost and schedule pressures. Cost and schedules have always been a part of the engineering practice, they are a key part of the challenge of engineering design and they are natural constraint that good engineers learn to adapt to and overcome in their practices. This is what makes what engineers play in the engineering sandbox rather than play in a pure science experiment sandbox: engineers design performance driven products, not one-of prototype.

Economics is an important constraint in engineering, but economics has always played a secondary role to getting the design right and getting the performance right. The driving force for all engineering endeavors has always about making the right decisions for performance and safety. Even though engineers do not take the Hippocratic oath as the medical professionals do, the vast majority of the engineers that I know pride ourselves in doing no harm.

In the letter, Mr. Sorscher spoke of Boeing being an engineering company first and foremost during his time at the company, a company that is driven by delivering performance. He spoke of how Boeing’s devotion to this engineering centered culture enabled Boeing to become what they had become, a trusted brand that delivered on the promise of performance while rising in importance in the world economy and competing with the likes of Apple and Exxon for investors. He spoke about the company culture turning to employee engagement, process improvement, and productivity in the late 90’s; which followed the management trends of the day, taking the quality centered approach of the Total Quality movement that came from Juran, Deming, and Shewart. An American approach that ironically took a trip to Japan before American management would deign to adopt it and even then, only as a Japanese innovation.  Fortunately for them, that new emphasis on quality and customer satisfaction was perfectly aligned with the engineering culture that was already in place.

I entered the manufacturing world at the end of the performance driven culture in the American electric motor industry. Even though the industry I entered was not as complex, there was a pride in the design and manufacture of our electric motors. The cost pressures were never-ending, particularly from certain market segments that are extremely cost sensitive: consumer products, white goods, commercial products to name a few; but the driving philosophy has always been to deliver on the promised performance. My corner of the world also went through the quality revolution, although we did not embrace the siren’s song as completely because the stakes were not as high in the electric motor industry since our failures do not necessarily involve deciding the lives of hundreds of customers. The costs associated with implementing quality measures and practices were a larger fraction of the overall product manufacturing cost in the electric motor industry and were constantly weighed against the product price. In addition, there is always the incessant desire within the business to increase the replacement business, i.e. why make the existing product better when we want the customer to buy replacement products?

Unfortunately, electric motors were also tagged as a “mature” technology, an ignominious and ignoble designation. It implied to management, marketing, and various other non-technical functions within the corporation that there was no need to spend time and money to do research or development, that the technology has reached the ends of the knowledge evolution. Little did it occur to these decision makers that the technical world is ever changing; the physics may be the same but the constraints on the design, the performance requirements, and the material sciences all change. It boggled the mind to think that this same comment was made of the airplane as Mr. Sorscher implied. Technology maturity as designated for financial incentives is not a scientific verdict, it is an excuse to economize and cut cost. A technology is labeled “mature” when management is looking to spend their money elsewhere and invest in things other than technology. This decision of course, was coming from non-technical or barely technical decision makers who rely on rote beliefs that does not tke into account technology evolution and assumes that there is indeed a finite lifetime to scientific development.

Mr. Sorscher’s description of what came later in the evolution of the Boeing culture is where I felt the greatest pangs of poignancy. Cost cutting and shareholder value became the focus, performance and quality took a very far back seat. When Mr. Sorscher asked the question: “Are airplanes commodity-like or performance-driven?”, I was shocked. It never occurred to me to think of an airplane as a commodity. I certainly would not put my life in the hands of aircraft engineers who believe that they are designing commodities. And yet, that is what happened.

In my own work experience, some electric motors, most electric motors that I worked with, have evolved into commodities, or at least in the eyes of the corporate executive. Emphasis on engineering and manufacturing went away and platforms which emphasized commonality of components that imposed compromise performances became the norm. Product characteristics that were defined by application and industry uniqueness were sacrificed in service to the simpler manufacturing, bookkeeping, and warehousing. As Mr. Sorscher recounts, the cost-cutting culture consists of super-stakeholders doing what super-stakeholders do:

These companies are super-stakeholders with market power over their supply chains. The point of this business model is that the super-stakeholder extracts gains from the subordinate stakeholders for the short-term benefit of investors.

Subordinate stakeholders are made to feel precarious and at-risk. Each supplier should see other suppliers as rivals. Similarly, each work location should know it competes on cost with rival work locations. Each state or local government should compete for incentives against rival states. 

In this model, subordinate stakeholders never say “no” to the super-stakeholder — not workers, not suppliers, not state legislatures.

This is exactly what happened in the electric motor world, contrary to point 4 of W. Edward Deming’s fourteen points, which was: End the practice of awarding business on price alone; instead, minimize total cost by working with a single supplier.

Indeed, the imposition of the cost-cutting culture degrades the performance and quality driven culture which created the Boeing company up to that point. In my experience, this same cost-cutting culture had diminished many of the electric motor companies to the point that the true value of the company is but a shadow of its former self. Granted, the electric motor is much closer to being a commodity than an airplane, but the deleterious effects of the cost-cutting culture shows no preference, it is a cancer that affects all industries the same way. As Mr. Sorscher stated:

This cost-cutting culture is the opposite of a culture built on productivity, innovation, safety, or quality. A high-performance work culture requires trust, coordination, strong problem-solving, open flow of information and commitment to the overall success of the program. In a high-performance culture, stakeholders may sacrifice for the good of the program, understanding that their interests are served in the long run.

The cost cutting culture obviated technical knowhow in deference to short term profits, it sacrificed fundamental engineering practices rooted in the sciences at the altar of the sub-optimal solutions that are just good enough and are based on guesswork, linear extrapolation, and fictional beliefs.

In the case of the electric motor world, the cost-cutting culture caused the companies that were once dominant in the business to fade and atrophy. Their share of the business eroding and losing market shares to cheapest producer nations. The truth is you cannot cost cut enough to compete with the lowest cost producer, you need to innovate enough to cause your trajectory to bypass and short circuit their trajectory. Those companies that could not only contain cost but also innovate, think progressively, and pioneer new markets seem to do better; while those that could only cut cost have de-evolved to the point of irrelevance in the global market.  The advent of new technologies in power electronics, material sciences, and advanced computing are meeting the needs of new applications and markets. In this case, the challenges of the applications are taking the electric motor technology out of the “mature” technology dustbin and putting them right back into the performance driven world.

I hope Boeing heeds Mr. Sorscher’s criticism and acknowledge their mistakes. I hope that there are enough technologists and engineers left in the significant ranks of Boeing to enable the cultural shift for the better. The cancer is deep, however, and the problem is complex. Every misstep costly, and every bad decision is life threatening. The cost-cutting culture proved to be fatal to many electric motor companies I certainly hope that it isn’t fatal for Boeing.