Financial Times Europe - 02.11.2019 - 03.11.2019

2 November/3 November 2019 ★ FT Weekend 9

Opinion

3 ‘Workington man’ is just the latest depressing political caricature Electoral stereotypes help lobbyists but hobble unity, writesMiranda Green

Top reads at FT.com/opinion

3 The NBA and LeBron James should take a knee for Hong Kong The communist party should know China can’t rise without help, writesCarson Block

and to be the leader. But Ray said I am the boss in Seattle,” the partner says. So Mr Muilenburg focused on financial targets and investor returns, which had become the priority after the costly fiasco of the787 Dreamliner launchin

His position now hangs in the bal-
ance. Already stripped of his chairman-
ship, he stands accused of failing to react
quickly enough to the crashes and to
recognise the gravity of Boeing’s role. He
tried to address these allegations at the
hearing. “We are sorry. Deeply and truly
sorry. As a husband and father myself, I
am heartbroken by your losses,” the
father of two told families of the victims.
Boeing is still reluctant to accept there
was any loss of focus on safety in the
race to get the 737 Max to market. The
most Mr Muilenburg would concede
was that with hindsight it is now clear
that something went wrong: “If we knew
everything then that we know now, we
would have made different decisions.”

ThewriteristheFT’sindustryeditor

executive was to repair relations with Boeing’s workers and suppliers who some felt had been alienated by Mr McNerney. But he did not change the company’s federated structure, which some critics say contributed to the current crisis. Boeing’s decision to move its head-

quarters to Chicago in 2001 hadsealed the CEO’s role as one of strategy and financial management, with little divi- sional involvement. Mr Muilenburg did try to stamp his authority over the Seat- tle-based commercial division, says an industrial partner. But it was run by Ray Conner, his rival for the top job. “Dennis tried to visit Seattle more frequently

ranks. In 2009 he became its head, reporting to then-chief executive Jim McNerney. By 2015 he was group chief executive, taking over as chairman in 2016 when Mr McNerney retired. The contrast between the two men could not have been greater. Mr McNer- ney, the first outsider and non-engineer to head Boeing, took “a real command and control approach: I say this and you do that”, says a company insider. “Den- nis is more of a hearts-and-minds person who wants to inspire people to come with him rather than terrify them.” He often does that through sport. A keen cyclist, Mr Muilenburg claims to pedal some 10,000 miles a year, fuelled largely by Diet Mountain Dew. The fizzy, fluorescent drink “energises me”, he said in atelevision interview. He takes his bike on site visits and uses cycling for team bonding. “We hand out Boeing T-shirts. It is a great way to get with the team,” he said. “Taking time to exercise and think makes me a better leader.” Mr Muilenburg’s first task as chief

A

t the 2015 Paris air show, Dennis Muilenburg seemed to have it all. With his military crew cut, startlingly blue eyes and athlete’s tan, the man about to take over Boeing was bursting with energy about the aerospace and defence company’s future. Fast forward four years and the crew cut is a little greyer, the complexion paler and the future less certain. Mr Muilenburg is aman under siege. This week the 55-year-old Boeing chief executive was grilled by the US Congress about two fatal crashes of the company’s best-selling 737 Max jet that killed 346 people. Over two gruelling days, lawmakers interrogated he Boeing chief on evi-t dence that called into question the company’s focus on safety in the drive to get the Max certified for flight, and sug- gested that staff had been aware for some time of problems with the MCAS anti-stall system cited by investigators as a factor in the incidents. Worse, Boeing was accused of pushing the aviation regulator to limit demands for costlypilot training on the 737 Max, and putting “undue pressure” on staff to meet production and cost targets. “Those pilots never had a chance. The [passengers] never had a chance. They were in flying coffins,” said one senator. Mr Muilenburg, sitting ramrod straight, seemed ill-equipped to respond to criti- cism nd the demands for his resigna-a tion. At times emotional, herepeatedly insisted that Boeing had not put profits ahead of safety: “We don’t ‘sell’ safety. That is not our business model.” An industry executive who has worked with Mr Muilenburg says the hearings show “he cannot understand what has happened to him over last cou- ple of months.. .He was not himself any more. He was like a robot.” Part of Mr Muilenburg’s problem is that he is having to defend decisions taken years before he became chief executive. These included deciding to launch a tweaked version of an older jet that would be quicker and cheaper to bring to market than a new design. The MCAS system was specially designed to compensate for challenges imposed by that decision and was built to rely on a single sensor, which proved faulty in the crashes. “How did you have an engineering environment that designs a system that has the power to bring a plane down with no redun- dancy?” asks Ron Epstein, a trained aerospace engineer and equity analyst. Born to an Iowa farming family, Mr Muilenburg joined Boeing in 1985 after earning an aeronautic engineering degree at Iowa State University. He began his career in the company’s Seat- tle facilities, where he worked on commercial and defence projects. In the late 1990s, he was put in charge of the engineering team designing the weapons systems for Boeing’s proposed new com- bat aircraft. Boeing lost out to Lockheed Martin’s F-35, but he had made a mark. After an aborted attempt to set up an air-traffic management business, Mr Muilenburg returned to the defence division, where he moved quickly up the

Person in the news Dennis Muilenburg|

Boeing’s engineer

in the line of fire

The aerospace group’s

chief executive came

under withering attack

in Congress this week,

writes eggy HollingerP

‘We are sorry. Deeply and

truly sorry. As a husband

and father myself, I

am heartbroken’

B

ritish politics is full of people who think they’re playing mah-jong but they’re actually playing Ludo.” Wise words fromRobert Shrimsley n theo Financial Times’s politics podcast — but I fear the situation is even worse. British politics may be full of people who aren’t playing any good games at all. That would be a shame for them, and for us. Games are wonderful; we should all be playing more of them. In truth, any sort of serious hobby seems to be valuable. Many of the smartest people have at least one: Albert Michelson, the physicist who measured the speed of light and won a Nobel Prize, painted well, played the violin, and was a seriously good billiards player. “Billiards is a good game,” he once announced. But it was not as good as painting. Painting was not as good as music. “But then music is not as good a game as physics.” Michelson was not alone. One long- running study of scientists, begun by the psychologist Bernice Eiduson in 1958, found that the most successful scientists tended to pursue arts, sports or music to a high level. In contrast, the less successful scientists “had no comments on hobbies or artistic proclivities either because they had none or found them irrelevant to their work”. But of all the deep pastimes one might embrace there’s nothing quite like a tabletop game to sharpen the mind, strengthen friendships and ease the soul. A quick internet search will produce countless explanations of why boardgames are good for children— they get them away from screens and social media, subvert family hierar- chies, allow them to experience success and failure in a safe environment, and teach social and cognitive skills. I have no argument with any of that, but games should not just be for children. All those benefits accrue to adults, too. Almost a decade ago I interviewed Klaus Teuber, creator of The Settlers of Catan, one of the best and most successful modern boardgames. “You can know someone for 10 years,” Mr Teuber told me, “and the first time you play a game with them you see a side you never saw before.” It’s true. A good game is a refreshing change of tone from gossip or dinner party chit-chat about politics or house prices, yet it remains a convivial activity for consenting adults. Games can be a serious matter, of course. War games have been used by the military since the early 1800s, when the Prussian army’s love of Kriegsspiel

was widely thought to be one of the secrets of their military success. A tabletop war game uses models to represent troops, dice to represent the vicissitudes of war, and an umpire to introduce the possibility of miscommu- nication. It teaches deeper lessons than simply thinking and planning, while being just as safe. Thomas Schelling —a cold war strate- gist andwinner of the Nobel Prize in economics — once wrote: “One thing a person cannot do, no matter how rigor- ous his analysis or heroic his imagina- tion, is to draw up a list of things that would never occur to him.” War games offer a solution to that conundrum: the experience of trying to outwit a gaming opponent makes the unimaginable start to seem familiar. More elaborate field exercises can produce a great deal of understanding. Steven Johnson, author ofFarsighted, argues that a major US Navy war game exercise in 1932, “Fleet Problem XIII”, highlighted the vulnerability of US naval bases to attack from Japan. The game produced the insight, if anyone cared to use it. But the highest form of gaming is, of course, the role-playing game, of which Dungeons & Dragons is the most famous example. Role-playing games are noto- riously difficult to describe, but they combine the dice-rolling rules of a war game with the long-running characters of a soap opera, and a healthy dose of improvised theatre and “let’s pretend”. Martin Lloyd, the creator of the chil-

dren’s role-playing game Amazing Tales, argues that such games have all sorts of benefits: they bring friends together, inspire individual and collec- tive creativity and require problem- solving. They have sometimes been used with more ambitious therapeutic goals in mind — for example, to help people on the autism spectrum develop social skills, and as an alternative to group therapy for military veterans. But for most gamers the point of games is that they are enjoyable in a deeper way than most mere entertain- ments. They create moments of enchantment to rival the finest music or theatre. A good game has you solving puzzles, throwing yourself into improvised acting, and then helpless with tears of laughter. The friendships I’ve forged over the gaming table have been the ones that have lasted. But Mr Teuber put it best. “Every day we work hard and we make mistakes and we are punished for those mistakes. Games take us to another role where you can make mistakes and you don’t get punished for them. You can always start another game.”

[email protected]

The games that

smart people play

They create moments

of enchantment to

rival the finest

music or theatre

Tim Harford

The undercover economist

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merica’s cold civil war just turned red hot. On Thurs- day, the US House of Repre- sentatives adopted formal procedures for its impeachment investigation. Unlike prior prelim- inary impeachment votes, this was a hyper-partisan affair. No one fromDon- ald Trump’s Republican party crossed the aisle to vote for the measure. By contrast, in 1998 more than 30 Democratic congressmen supported opening an impeachment inquiry into Bill Clinton. In 1974 the vote to confer subpoena power upon the impeachment investigation that led to the resig- nation of Richard Nixon was 410-4, including 177 Republicans. In those cases, impeachment was a political act but not necessarily a partisan one. It is not just Congress, America has

changed. Four decades ago, the country was more homogeneous and its politics less tribal, even amid the war in Viet- nam, the aftermath of the civil rights movement, and the assassinations of John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King. The previous century had built up a lot of social-capital equity. Nixon had won re-election in a 20 per- centage point landslide in 1972, yet it failed to render him immune from scru- tiny. The break-in at the Watergate com- plex, followed by the firing of Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor looking into the matter, and the tapes that captured him appearing to interfere with the probe, ultimately doomed him. A unan- imous Supreme Court and Republican congressional leaders forced Nixon’s hand. His helicopter departure from the White House reflected the national con- sensus. His time was over. Now Mr Trump stands to become the third US president to be impeached by the House. Yet like Andrew Johnson and Mr Clinton before him, Mr Trump will probably be acquitted by the Senate.

Under the constitution, a two-thirds supermajority is required. With the GOP controlling the upper chamber, a guilty verdict seems unlikely. For all the pyrotechnics surrounding impeachment, no US president has ever been removed from office. In that sense, Nixon’s plight serves as a poor model for the 45th president. Back in 1974, America’s television news menu was limited to three networks. There was no smorgasbord of partisan viewing and opinion options equivalent to today’s Fox News, CNBC and the internet. Republicans and Democrats alike looked to CBS’s Walter Cronkite for their nightly news. Yet predictability does not render this impeachment process meaningless. Rather, with Mr Trump’s disapproval ratings seemingly frozenaround 54 per cent, and the 2020 presidential election just 12 months away, impeachment at this juncture remains significant and historic regardless of its outcome. At a minimum, impeachment will again highlight the president’s Achilles

heel, namely the limit of his political legitimacy: in 2016, Mr Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton. But for the mechanics of the electoral college, Mrs Clinton would be in the Oval Office. Try as they might, Mr Trump and his supporters remain haunted by the fact they were rejected by a majority of voters. Between 1992 and 2016, the

Republicans failed to win the popular vote six out of seven times. The admin- istration’s efforts to paint the president as a victim of mass voter fraud have gone nowhere. Put differently, impeachment is a reminder that more than half the population saw its will thwarted in 2016. Although the president and his sup-

porters have branded impeachment a coup, the process is prescribed by the constitution, and its antecedents date back to England. Alexander Hamilton, a lead author of the Federalist Papers (and more recently the hero of Lin- Manuel Miranda’s smash hit musical), depicted impeachment as a check on a president who paid little or no heed to the strictures of his office. InFederalist No. 65, Hamilton wrote that impeachment was designed to rem- edy “those offences which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust.” In his view, the constitution’s reference to “high Crimes and Misdemeanours” covers more than just indictable offences. Like the Clinton impeachment, the current iteration looms as a rallying cry for both sides of the political divide. Think of the 2018 hearings on Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomin- ation, but on steroids. Last year, those contentious proceed- ingshelped deliver the House to the

Expect a repeat

of Kavanaugh’s

confirmation hearings

but on steroids

Democrats in the midterm elections. But they also unified the Republican base, allowing Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and the Republicans to solidify their hold on the upper house, even as Nancy Pelosi seized the Speaker’s gavel. At present, impeachment is expected to come to a final vote in the House before Christmas, with the Senate sitting as a jury at the start of the new year. That will keep at least four top Democratic contenders — Corey Booker, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren — in Washington to help weigh the president’s fate. Former vice-president Joe Biden, who will be free to criss-cross Iowa and New Hampshire, says thank you. Impeachment will probably electrify an electorate that is already on edge and leave it feeling even more divided. Election Day 2020 can’t come soon enough.

The writer was opposition research counsel forGeorgeHWBush’s1988campaign

A Trump impeachment would further divide an angry America

Lloyd Green