And no, it’s not just the Three Stooges who can mess up a job. Toss in cost-squeezing negotiations, move-risk-off-the-balance-sheet approaches, geographic distances and varying time-zones, linguistic and cultural differences and a few other similar ingredients. Heat and stir, and voila: you have one fine mess served up on a  plate of your choosing.

The Principles of Management course taught to us in our undergraduate engineering curriculum was woefully short of context. Examples like the Dreamliner mess should be a gift from god to teachers trying to emphasise these principles to aspiring geeks.

It’s widely documented – see it here, here and here.

It’’s the last that has a particularly arresting telling paragraph:

The company’s chief, W. James McNerney Jr., concedes that Boeing lost control of the process by farming out more design and production work than ever and not keeping close tabs on suppliers. He says the company is retaking control.

And even more educating:

“The idea was to get the risk off their books and get other people to do the heavy lifting for them,” Mr. Aboulafia said. “But the flaw was that led to a kind of ‘engineering light’ approach, and the problems on the 787 can be traced to that.”

“Engineering light” In an aircraft? That’s going to take some explaining to the students. And with an estimated 10 Billion Dollar overrun that’s some education.

The figure is from the article, whose author can be forgiven for rounding off accounting sums to a nice, resounding figure. You can read some  more gloom-and-doom on costs here, but there’s no arguing that Ten Billion Dollars has a nice weighty sound to it.

And Michael Crichton’s Airframe looks even more appealing as a must-read textbook for engineering students of courses like “Principles of Management”.