Where is the competition?
In 2004, engineers in Hamburg, Germany were busy setting up the electrical wiring system inside the world’s largest passenger airliner ever made, the Airbus A380: a plane that could carry around 800 passengers offering relaxation areas, bars, beauty salons, restaurants and duty-free shops. The price of this A380 plane; €400 million. That is the salary of 70,000 full time employees in Mexico, for 1 entire year.
Imagine you want to set your TV in the balcony but there is not a nearby socket where to plug the power cord into, so you go to IKEA and buy a 3 meter long cable extension. When you come back home you realize this cable is too short, you needed a longer one, oops, back to IKEA. That is a problem that can happen to everyone, literally.
And this is what happened to Airbus in Hamburg during 2004 where those German engineers found the same problem; the cables that should go inside the A380 were too short, they could not assemble the plane and production stopped. It was not 1 but 100,000 wires.
The consequences? Delays, tons of burnt money, angry customers and people fired.
One would think that projects of this dimension, with the most talented people working behind and deep pockets backing the company would only face very complex engineering problems, technical aerospace challenges. One could understand delays on production due to high complex challenges but never due to basic mistakes.
The big project of the A380 was a collaboration between Spanish, British, French and Germans, some parts of the plane were made in France and were sent to Hamburg for the final assemble, this is why the problem was discovered too late, just about to assemble the whole plane. And basic mistakes did happened.
Imagine you want to send a Whatsapp to your friend, your friend has an old iPhone with the old apple operating system iOS 7. Your friend will never receive that message in her phone because she needs to upgrade the operating system.
And this is what happened in the Airbus case, the cables could not fit because the calculations of the length of the wires were done by a software which the French were using a newer version (CATIA v5) than the Germans (CATIA v4). The Germans did not upgrade the software. The discussions and blaming started between both offices, each of them defending their position; the intellectual discussion was about the systems but in reality was nothing to do with systems but everything to do with people: Fear & Ego.
“People who run a set on fear or a business on fear I say; are really stupid”
David Lynch
Fear paralyse employees, reduce morale and motivation. But even worse than that: it makes people lie. A very natural and survival reaction against threat and risk is self protection. Job protection. Fear enhances dishonesty as one would never admit a mistake or would never speak up knowing the consequences can be severe so the default is to lie whilst saying and showing to management what they want to hear and see.
Egos are founded on deep insecurities, these insecurities are normally covered by showing overconfidence and by being loud; high egos need to feel admired, venerated or praised and the best tactic to do so is by showing they are right, others are wrong or by stealing other’s ideas, this pushes the high egos to be self-centred and stop listening to comments, feedback or recommendations. Recognising the value of others and collaborating is an impossible task. Egos are addicted to pride.
The higher the ego the higher fear, and the higher the fear the higher ego.
The Airbus mistake cost billions of euros and there are countless examples of companies getting into financial troubles as a result of high egos & fear, the most recent story comes from WeWork where founder Adam Neumann brought the company to crash and destroyed enormous amount of value, but Adam walked away with high ego and high amount of money. Unfortunately, other examples have not only ended with money lost but lives too; Clifford (Cliff) Baxter, former Enron Vice-chairman killed himself after the Enron scandal, Cliff left a suicide note:
Carol,
I am so sorry for this. I feel I just can’t go on. I have always tried to do the right thing but where there was once great pride now it’s gone. I love you and the children so much. I just can’t be any good to you or myself. The pain is overwhelming.
Please try to forgive me.
Cliff
Another tragedy was the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger caused by a series of decisions management made at NASA the night before the launch.
The NASA failure is well related on a book written by a man who opposed the launch the night before, Allan McDonald together with other engineers recommended NASA to NOT launch because the temperature was too cold.
The egos, the fear and the pressure from top level made ignore the advice and the NASA went on, 73 seconds after taking off, the Challenger exploded, killing all 7 crew members.
“Managers [at NASA] grilled engineers and forced them to produce data to back up their assertions”
David Epstein, Range
Fear & Ego are tremendously dangerous for any corporation but often overlooked because from the outside it looks like overconfidence and loudness (extroverts), and those are seen positive traits by many companies, but these overconfidence and loudness are most of the time synonymous of high fear, high ego and stubbornness. There is nothing more dangerous than someone acting with fear and stubbornness; A bull in a china shop.
The companies of the future will not only provide physical health support, free drinks, GYM, vegan food, yoga and massage, the companies of the future shall offer mental support through therapists, psychologists and coaches who will help employees become a better version of themselves.
Did the external competitors of Airbus, WeWork, Enron or NASA had anything to do with the disasters of these companies? not really.
Where is the competition? Look closer, inside, deeper, go find a mirror, or a therapist.
