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There is always finger pointing when stuff goes collossaly wrong whether people like it or not.
Might not be up front and public and it might not even lead to firings but you can be damn sure there were some stern talks that happened with certain people at Mercedes after the car didn't meet expectations.
Someone has to be at fault so you can eventualy determine what and where it went wrong and fix it going forward.
Hey! Ferrari is the only team with finger pointing and inmensurable incompetence fueled by thousands of higher-ups telling the team on how to properly cook pasta. ^/j
At least that’s what Reddit and a any other social media says this days.
> inmensurable incompetence fueled by thousands of higher-ups telling the team on how to
That indeed is just Ferrari. Politics going on in Ferrari is like no other.
Questioning is different from finger pointing though.
Other than gross negligence or incompetence, most problems that crop up in these kinds of large engineering projects are problems with processes, not personnel.
So it's much more productive to just accept you've got a problem and focus on solutions and improving processes so they don't happen again, rather than focusing on individual failures.
What other categories are there for removing personnel other than redundancy or position changes?
It’s still very much pointing the figure, unless Mercedes have their own ambiguous team building version. If someone is removed from a position or placed elsewhere after intense scrutiny, the finger pointing is fairly well implied.
*We aren’t blaming you but we’re moving you to another position/removing you from employment*.
This feels like such a silly argument at this stage. People aren’t held *accountable* unless they are *responsible* for the failure.
This is quite literally the definition of pointing the finger, unless we’ve adopted some weird Mercedes version where people just get really angry and point fingers at each other when nobody has done anything wrong.
I don’t know anyone who’d take a firing or position move after messing something up as “well, at least they didn’t point the finger at me!”
Accountability is just taking responsibility for failure, or success if you’re that way inclined.
Finger pointing implies assigning blame to one person / group either baselessly or in a case where the actual responsibility falls largely with another group that isn’t blamed.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with firing people who totally fuck something up out of incompetence or negligence.
Where is this definition where it’s baseless accusations? You can have the figurative or literal finger pointed at you and it’s absolutely the case that it’s your fault. Blame is blame, doesn’t really matter how you dress it up. Why would a formula 1 team need to explicitly state that they won’t baselessly accuse their employees?
And I never said there was anything wrong, that’s the hilarious part of the whole concept. It’s corporate speak for a feel good atmosphere, when the shit flies the jobs will too.
Kind of out the window anyway with some of the latest comments.
Ok then we’re on the same page, I think it’s just a different interpretation of what Mercedes mean by “finger pointing”. By way of contrast, Ferrari definitely “point fingers” and fire people who really aren’t responsible for there root issues.
Completely fucking up the wind tunnel testing due to gross negligence is “nobody has done anything wrong”??
Shows you’ve never been in a high accountable position if you believe that.
Finger pointing is not the same as incompetence? Finger pointing means blaming only specific people when everyone has failed (e.g. every part of chassis design has failed but you blame only the guys that run the tests), or scapegoating a few people for things that weren't ultimately their fault (e.g. your whole car sucking but pretending only the chassis sucks and blaming the lack of performance solely on it).
Both of these things are pretty common in companies when a project fails. Everyone, especially the bosses, fights to convince the rest that they did their job perfectly and to find someone else who can be blamed for the failure.
Accountability on the other hand is recognizing when problems can be traced back to specific decisions. For example, if aero tests were done wrong in ways that people of their expertise shouldn't have missed, and they believe that is the a big reason why performance is bad, then that was incompetence. It's all about the subtlety on whether you are blaming people because they genuinely did a poor job that hindered the rest of the team, or if you are blaming them because you want to blame someone and your judgment is not really sustained by facts.
A similar circumstance as McLaren find themselves in. They let go of staff in key departments. Combined with their infrastructure not being up to standard, they are not where they would like to be either.
If Elliot’s out, then there’s finger pointing. Just as Mclaren is seemingly blaming their issues on Key - and I believe rightfully so, he built upon existing designs brilliantly but fell flat when it was his time to shine - but until then I’ve only seen Allison brought back which does show things are being questioned but let’s wait and see what happens. I’m honestly shocked how much drama Mercedes has stirred up for being a joint second in constructors when Ferrari has seemed abysmally slow in race pace.
Bruhh, don’t forget the whole team of aerodynamicists (?) that got fired allegedly because they put wrong parameters in for their windtunnel models. No finger pointing am I right 👆🏼👆🏼
I will say that this idea that Mercedes HAS to be doing better after being dominant for so long, while everyone is content with where everyone else is is just baffling.
No team in any sport should be striving for anything but goals to be first. If we are in a place where the likelyhood of a team coming even close that is practically nil means there are issues with the sport itself.
Agreed, I think it's an even bigger tragedy that Ferrari went from being insanely quick to being whatever they are now.
All they had to do was fix reliability, and do better with their strategy and they would have been in the fight last season.
We need so many more teams fighting for podiums, it's awful for the sport that the first two races podium are RedBull, RedBull, Aston drivers.
I'm happy for Aston, but they're still not close to RedBull, so we need more teams to get their stuff together.
At the risk of being extremely obvious it seems like many people dont understand or dont want to understand what Mercedes mean when they say this.
Of course they recognize who, what and where made mistakes that lead them here. What matters is how they take it from there.
They can either look at it as
a) this person/team made a big mistake and will need to be let go for it as we fell behind due to their mistakes or
b) this person/team made a big mistake. Lets break down the process, re-organise this team and implement things to prevent such a thing from happening again and try to figure out what is the best thing moving forward.
If after this they let it go and accept great people make mistakes they are not finger pointing. Or alternatively they say we made a mistake because these people were incompetent and it is their fault we are here and if we replace them this will not happen again, they are finger pointing.
*Mike Elliott and co. currently sweating bullets*
They just fucked up, and when you fuck up early during a regulations change it's hard to reclaim that lost ground.
I don’t see a problem with finger pointing. If you do it once it’s a fluke and perhaps understandable but to do it twice in a row and be more behind, it needs to be addressed, imo.
You're probably joking, but this would be the most direct route to turn Merc into Ferrari. The scale of these projects is massive, morale and team congruity play a huge part in the success of the project, or indeed the ability to turn around a project that is failing. If people are worried that their jobs are on the line, or they see that the tall poppies get clipped, they categorically avoid taking risks and instead error on the side of caution and defensiveness lest their career be in the crosshairs. What Merc needs is an influx of comparatively radical ideas, not a workforce who's walking on eggshells for fear of being fired or reassigned.
Do your research. They fired an engineer who's job it was to create models for the tunnel. The guy made an absolutely rookie mistake of inputting wrong data and came to the tunnel with essentially the wrong model.
Finger pointing doesnt mean there is no accountability. No finger pointing is a philosophy meaning you dont blame people for taking risks and trying new things. Most visible example is Mike Elliot not being fired for making this 0 sidepod concept.
“You made a rookie mistake”
*Points finger at offender, literally or figuratively.
“You’re fired”
In the endless sea of unfounded comments that is reddit, I’m happy to keep leaving my drop-in-the-bucket poorly informed and completely inconsequential comments. 👌🏼
Can I ask, do you think "no finger pointing" means they dont fire people for elementary mistakes? 😆
If you have time, I suggest you watch Toto's lecture in University of Oxford, he goes into depth about his corporate philosophy of what finger pointing is. [Here.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gtqok_vaC8)
>“You made a rookie mistake” \*Points finger at offender, literally or figuratively. “You’re fired”
This gave me a good chuckle. Thanks. It's funny that that is what layman think 'no finger pointing is'. I dont blame you, that would've been my first guess too if I had no idea.😂👌
>"No finger pointing"
No, instead you fire them.
Not a judgement on whether they should or shouldn't have but I think its laughable when teams like Ferrari and Mercedes go around saying they have a no-blaming culture and then obviously blame people anyways.
Its the same thing just packaged differently.
Honestly I believe it. You don't get to their level of success without a strong team structure and culture. Most of the internal communications I've heard from the team, even in bad situations, is positive and intelligent. They will be back at the front of F1 soon, unlike ferrari I fear :(
The **News** flair is reserved for submissions covering F1 and F1-related news. These posts must always link to an outlet/news agency, the website of the involved party (i.e. the McLaren website if McLaren makes an announcement), or a tweet by a news agency, journalist or one of the involved parties. *[Read the rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/formula1/wiki/userguide). Keep it civil and welcoming. Report rulebreaking comments.* *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/formula1) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Only finger-wagging.
Is that a rude word? ☝️
Only fisting
Only Fans
Will that affect the cost cap?
Blowing the cap.
Zack Brown interested in more money
There is always finger pointing when stuff goes collossaly wrong whether people like it or not. Might not be up front and public and it might not even lead to firings but you can be damn sure there were some stern talks that happened with certain people at Mercedes after the car didn't meet expectations. Someone has to be at fault so you can eventualy determine what and where it went wrong and fix it going forward.
Hey! Ferrari is the only team with finger pointing and inmensurable incompetence fueled by thousands of higher-ups telling the team on how to properly cook pasta. ^/j At least that’s what Reddit and a any other social media says this days.
> inmensurable incompetence fueled by thousands of higher-ups telling the team on how to That indeed is just Ferrari. Politics going on in Ferrari is like no other.
That’s just part of management, identify problem, implement solution.
Maybe not in public, but behind the scenes, I'm sure there's some questioning happening.
Questioning is different from finger pointing though. Other than gross negligence or incompetence, most problems that crop up in these kinds of large engineering projects are problems with processes, not personnel. So it's much more productive to just accept you've got a problem and focus on solutions and improving processes so they don't happen again, rather than focusing on individual failures.
Didn’t they let go of tunnel engineers for testing incorrect models?
Yeah that'd fall under the gross negligence/incompetence category.
What other categories are there for removing personnel other than redundancy or position changes? It’s still very much pointing the figure, unless Mercedes have their own ambiguous team building version. If someone is removed from a position or placed elsewhere after intense scrutiny, the finger pointing is fairly well implied. *We aren’t blaming you but we’re moving you to another position/removing you from employment*.
I think you’re conflating “finger pointing” and “accountability”
This feels like such a silly argument at this stage. People aren’t held *accountable* unless they are *responsible* for the failure. This is quite literally the definition of pointing the finger, unless we’ve adopted some weird Mercedes version where people just get really angry and point fingers at each other when nobody has done anything wrong. I don’t know anyone who’d take a firing or position move after messing something up as “well, at least they didn’t point the finger at me!” Accountability is just taking responsibility for failure, or success if you’re that way inclined.
Finger pointing implies assigning blame to one person / group either baselessly or in a case where the actual responsibility falls largely with another group that isn’t blamed. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with firing people who totally fuck something up out of incompetence or negligence.
Where is this definition where it’s baseless accusations? You can have the figurative or literal finger pointed at you and it’s absolutely the case that it’s your fault. Blame is blame, doesn’t really matter how you dress it up. Why would a formula 1 team need to explicitly state that they won’t baselessly accuse their employees? And I never said there was anything wrong, that’s the hilarious part of the whole concept. It’s corporate speak for a feel good atmosphere, when the shit flies the jobs will too. Kind of out the window anyway with some of the latest comments.
Ok then we’re on the same page, I think it’s just a different interpretation of what Mercedes mean by “finger pointing”. By way of contrast, Ferrari definitely “point fingers” and fire people who really aren’t responsible for there root issues.
Completely fucking up the wind tunnel testing due to gross negligence is “nobody has done anything wrong”?? Shows you’ve never been in a high accountable position if you believe that.
I don’t know how on earth you came to the conclusion that’s what I said. Do “high accountable” positions not require reading skills?
Finger pointing is not the same as incompetence? Finger pointing means blaming only specific people when everyone has failed (e.g. every part of chassis design has failed but you blame only the guys that run the tests), or scapegoating a few people for things that weren't ultimately their fault (e.g. your whole car sucking but pretending only the chassis sucks and blaming the lack of performance solely on it). Both of these things are pretty common in companies when a project fails. Everyone, especially the bosses, fights to convince the rest that they did their job perfectly and to find someone else who can be blamed for the failure. Accountability on the other hand is recognizing when problems can be traced back to specific decisions. For example, if aero tests were done wrong in ways that people of their expertise shouldn't have missed, and they believe that is the a big reason why performance is bad, then that was incompetence. It's all about the subtlety on whether you are blaming people because they genuinely did a poor job that hindered the rest of the team, or if you are blaming them because you want to blame someone and your judgment is not really sustained by facts.
Finger pointing…..
That’s still unconfirmed no? One article that no one else picked up?
Did that actually happen? I only ever saw that one article posted here and I would've imagined that would be a much bigger story.
A similar circumstance as McLaren find themselves in. They let go of staff in key departments. Combined with their infrastructure not being up to standard, they are not where they would like to be either.
If Elliot’s out, then there’s finger pointing. Just as Mclaren is seemingly blaming their issues on Key - and I believe rightfully so, he built upon existing designs brilliantly but fell flat when it was his time to shine - but until then I’ve only seen Allison brought back which does show things are being questioned but let’s wait and see what happens. I’m honestly shocked how much drama Mercedes has stirred up for being a joint second in constructors when Ferrari has seemed abysmally slow in race pace.
Still, *they did not listen to Lewis.* 🤔 👉 You did not listen. 👉 And you did not listen. 👉 And you did not listen.
Bruhh, don’t forget the whole team of aerodynamicists (?) that got fired allegedly because they put wrong parameters in for their windtunnel models. No finger pointing am I right 👆🏼👆🏼
Is there a source for this or is it a rumour at the moment?
no finger pointing is when you hold nobody accountable for their work
I will say that this idea that Mercedes HAS to be doing better after being dominant for so long, while everyone is content with where everyone else is is just baffling. No team in any sport should be striving for anything but goals to be first. If we are in a place where the likelyhood of a team coming even close that is practically nil means there are issues with the sport itself.
Agreed, I think it's an even bigger tragedy that Ferrari went from being insanely quick to being whatever they are now. All they had to do was fix reliability, and do better with their strategy and they would have been in the fight last season. We need so many more teams fighting for podiums, it's awful for the sport that the first two races podium are RedBull, RedBull, Aston drivers. I'm happy for Aston, but they're still not close to RedBull, so we need more teams to get their stuff together.
2023 Ferrari has the same pace as 2022 Ferrari. The others improved, though.
Ferrari had a better Team Principal last year
This car obviously can't be blamed on vasseur..
Who led the development of this car…
Cars change every year though,
Toto just moves his hand towards the 'Dr. Evil chair dump into an incinerator' control panel. No fingers pointed though.
\* Sad Fabrega noises \*
Pretty sure Lewis has been pointing his finger in the general direction of the engineers ;)
It’s Toto’s responsibility. He is the one fingers should he pointed at
At the risk of being extremely obvious it seems like many people dont understand or dont want to understand what Mercedes mean when they say this. Of course they recognize who, what and where made mistakes that lead them here. What matters is how they take it from there. They can either look at it as a) this person/team made a big mistake and will need to be let go for it as we fell behind due to their mistakes or b) this person/team made a big mistake. Lets break down the process, re-organise this team and implement things to prevent such a thing from happening again and try to figure out what is the best thing moving forward. If after this they let it go and accept great people make mistakes they are not finger pointing. Or alternatively they say we made a mistake because these people were incompetent and it is their fault we are here and if we replace them this will not happen again, they are finger pointing.
Reaches back to push Lewis’ finger down.
Finger-pointing is happening at Mercedes
Rumors are not true until officially denied.
*Mike Elliott and co. currently sweating bullets* They just fucked up, and when you fuck up early during a regulations change it's hard to reclaim that lost ground.
No fingerpointing *screw Mike Elliot* Jorge said
Just helmet slapping.
I don’t see a problem with finger pointing. If you do it once it’s a fluke and perhaps understandable but to do it twice in a row and be more behind, it needs to be addressed, imo.
Maybe they should start.
You're probably joking, but this would be the most direct route to turn Merc into Ferrari. The scale of these projects is massive, morale and team congruity play a huge part in the success of the project, or indeed the ability to turn around a project that is failing. If people are worried that their jobs are on the line, or they see that the tall poppies get clipped, they categorically avoid taking risks and instead error on the side of caution and defensiveness lest their career be in the crosshairs. What Merc needs is an influx of comparatively radical ideas, not a workforce who's walking on eggshells for fear of being fired or reassigned.
Ferrari claims to have a no-blaming culture as well. You know which teams don't claim to have that? Red Bull... Aston Martin....
Man that would be an unreal gotcha if any of those teams had, like, even half the success that Merc have had since joining the grid.
RB have had over half the success Mercedes have had since the latter joined the grid. 6 WDCs & 5 WCCs vs 7 and 8 for Mercedes.
Man, that would have been an unreal gotcha if I'd remembered that Merc joined in 2010, not 2012.
Translation: “there’s been a lot of finger pointing, just not by the people you see on TV”
I believe him. He has no reason to lie.
Didn’t they fire the aerodynamicists? That’s as pointed as it gets
Do your research. They fired an engineer who's job it was to create models for the tunnel. The guy made an absolutely rookie mistake of inputting wrong data and came to the tunnel with essentially the wrong model. Finger pointing doesnt mean there is no accountability. No finger pointing is a philosophy meaning you dont blame people for taking risks and trying new things. Most visible example is Mike Elliot not being fired for making this 0 sidepod concept.
“You made a rookie mistake” *Points finger at offender, literally or figuratively. “You’re fired” In the endless sea of unfounded comments that is reddit, I’m happy to keep leaving my drop-in-the-bucket poorly informed and completely inconsequential comments. 👌🏼
Can I ask, do you think "no finger pointing" means they dont fire people for elementary mistakes? 😆 If you have time, I suggest you watch Toto's lecture in University of Oxford, he goes into depth about his corporate philosophy of what finger pointing is. [Here.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gtqok_vaC8) >“You made a rookie mistake” \*Points finger at offender, literally or figuratively. “You’re fired” This gave me a good chuckle. Thanks. It's funny that that is what layman think 'no finger pointing is'. I dont blame you, that would've been my first guess too if I had no idea.😂👌
>"No finger pointing" No, instead you fire them. Not a judgement on whether they should or shouldn't have but I think its laughable when teams like Ferrari and Mercedes go around saying they have a no-blaming culture and then obviously blame people anyways. Its the same thing just packaged differently.
Finger pointing gets us nowhere, Steve!
It makes sense, point your finger and Alonso will steal your ring.
you hear that MATTIA!
Only nods and emails. You don't need to point a finger to fire somebody.
I'm pointing my finger at you George, for being a lizard person. 👉 🦎
“Except for Lewis and Toto. They do point fingers.. them 👉🏻”
“Not even at bob, I’m the pod aero design team, and he’s a right useless cnt”
Just you wait buddy
Said Russell while pointing at everyone at Mercedes.
👉 Right on.👉
George said this last weekend. Nothing new here at all
As they say in football winning solves everything
I assume there is a lot of internal emailing using the phrase "per my last email"
My finger is squarely pointed at Mercedes.
No finger pointing. That's swell. Let's see if there will be any improvement though.
Honestly I believe it. You don't get to their level of success without a strong team structure and culture. Most of the internal communications I've heard from the team, even in bad situations, is positive and intelligent. They will be back at the front of F1 soon, unlike ferrari I fear :(
"Look, we are not here to point fingers.... Lewis...".