Face Time

Oren Harari notes that despite - and sometimes because of - the technology, "face time" is more important than ever. An excerpt from his post:

The second anecdote concerns Boeing’s execution woes. The 787 Dreamliner is a terrific success story. Orders left and right, sending Airbus reeling. The only problem is that Boeing can’t seem to get the damn plane built. The company is already more than six months behind schedule, which will cost them mucho millions of additional dollars in penalty fees, not to mention the blows that have already landed to its image and stock price. What happened?

Well, in order to reduce its R & D costs by over $10 billion, and to theoretically shorten time to market, Boeing outsourced most of the actual development and manufacturing of the plane to a global set of partners. The notion of a “global production model” seemed absolutely cutting edge, but because of poor face time, a whole plethora of Keystone Kops glitches has emerged.