"Danny Dot" wrote in message
...
Two commissions have written up that NASA culture is a major cause of our
two shuttle accidents. They site that engineers are afraid to speak up as
part of the problem.

My question is this: Is the culture worse at NASA than other places, or
does NASA have problems that are in other industries, and these other
places get away with it because the problem with their culture doesn't
result in a highly visible catastrophic event. Maybe a comparison to oil
refineries and chemical plants would be useful. In these industries,
catastrophic events can happen if the culture allows unsafe practices to
continue to happen.

There are companies in the US that take a "shoot the messenger" approach to
management. Consequently, middle to upper management in those companies
always hear that "everything is fine" even when the schedules keep slipping,
customers keep complaining, etc.

In private industry, the bigger problem I'm seeing is sending jobs overseas.
You're replacing highly experienced, highly paid, American employees with a
whole lot of under experienced, low pay (high for their area) people located
in the far east (India, China, South Korea, and etc). In the end, I think
you get what you pay for. From what I've seen, culturally people in the far
east don't like to tell management any sort of bad news. It seems to be
that they don't want their boss to see their weakness or perhaps it's just
that they don't want to disappoint authority, or something. At any rate,
this is so bad that coming from the US culture, you never know if any of
your workers in the far east really understand what you want them to do.

Combine the US shoot the messenger management with the far east don't let
management know things aren't going well and you've got a recipe for
absolute disaster.

Jeff
--
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a
little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor
safety"
- B. Franklin, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (1919)