Interesting discussion. Makes one wonder how much foresight was available at the time of the merger, warning or at least cautioning about a looming slide down from greatness, the sometimes slow, sometimes dramatic slide to the current state of affairs.
Regardless here we are ("we" meaning Boeing and the various constituencies such as the taxpayers, the U.S. Federal Government and its many roles as customer and regulator (and recently, investigator), and customers in air transport, and even the educational system with its need for placement slots for newly minted engineers - especially engineers - seeking situations of gainful employment)). Of particular urgency (as SLF/atty) is that there's a re-acquisition pending, bringing Spirit AeroSystems back into the Boeing corporate entity.
It appears there exists a perhaps necessarily ambiguous divide between a CEO who is trained as an engineer and leads and strategizes using and within an engineering mindset on one hand, and a CEO who is an engineer by training but is more attuned to financial considerations in the leadership and strategy direction of such a mammoth multi-billion-dollar business organization on the other hand.
Perhaps a fling against the Spirit re-acquisition could clarify where the focus needs to be, and how to delineate it. In the Spirit re-acquisition, there will need to be a deal term concerning the production work the company performs for Airbus. How would an ideal CEO taking the top job at Boeing envision the main deal terms with respect to the Airbus production at Spirit at the present time?
I'm wondering if there is precedent for a major subcontractor getting acquired (for this purpose, I don't think the "re" of re-acquired is a material deal factor) when the sub produces major components for a direct competitor, let alone the only major competitor, of the acquiring company. Lurching into anti-trust law on the international level, if those legal rules are relevant, the solution doesn't seem obvious. What about any proprietary information of Airbus held by Spirit for its Airbus production work, or Intellectual Property with legal protection even stronger than run-of-the-mill proprietary information? (Drawing that distinction because principles of aeronautics through which aircraft design methods and techniques are derived wouldn't seem to be so different when derived in Toulouse as compared to Greater Seattle - but some stuff undoubtedly is more closely held than the mere proprietary. Obviously I'm not an I.P. lawyer, though.)
And what about labor relations? The complications presented would lengthen any post . . .
The re-acquisition is kind of a real-time case study. My inclination would be to construct a solid, sturdy "ethical wall", "walling off" the Airbus business entirely; make it a separate subdivision of the Spirit entity which will be rolled back into Boeing. In law firms, when there are potential conflicts of interest, but those potential conflicts result from factors which can be prevented from materializing into actual conflict of interest, firms determine, distribute internally, and observe pretty rigorously "ethical walls". These separate one group of lawyers from the rest, preventing contact of any sort about the legal matter which could, if contacts or communicaitons occurred, cause the potential conflict of interest to materialize. Law firms used to call these "Chinese walls" but I guess that went out of fashion sometime around or before 1990.
Wall the Airbus portion of Spirit off. It's not based on an engineering mindset, and it also isn't said in pursuit of any of Wall Street's sophisticated numbers games. Of course, as it is suggested here by an SLF/non-engineer/attorney, probably it proves why the CEO role must not be given to any lawyer.