COLLECTIVE MADNESS


“Soft despotism is a term coined by Alexis de Tocqueville describing the state into which a country overrun by "a network of small complicated rules" might degrade. Soft despotism is different from despotism (also called 'hard despotism') in the sense that it is not obvious to the people."

Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Saga Continues: CEO abandons sinking Airbus. Help is on the way.

..."Mr Gallois denied suggestions that Airbus has been riven by internal tensions between the French and German parts of the company, arguing that Airbus's superjumbo woes stemmed mainly from difficulties installing wiring.

"This isn't a French or a German problem, it's a problem specific to Airbus," he said, adding that Airbus needed to be a better integrated company..." Telegraph

Airbus CEO resigns
Airbus Chief Executive Christian Streiff resigned Monday after a little more than three months as head of the troubled European plane maker and parent company EADS named one of its own co-CEOs to replace him. European Aeronautic Defence and Space Co. said in a statement Louis Gallois will succeed Streiff in the top job at Airbus while continuing in his current role as joint head of the Franco-German defense group. Streiff's departure deals a fresh blow to crisis-hit Airbus. The plane maker, which stunned investors in June by doubling the A380's production delay to one year, doubled it again this month to two years and said the holdups would cost EADS $6.1 billion in profits over four years. And according to a report from Reuters it will get tougher for Airbus.

PARIS, Oct 10 (Reuters) - Louis Gallois, the newly appointed head of planemaker Airbus, warned on Tuesday that there would likely be "painful" job losses at Airbus in the wake of delays to the A380 superjumbo and a profit warning at the company.

"There will be job cuts," Gallois told France's Europe 1 radio station.

Gallois was named late on Monday as the new head of Airbus after Christian Streiff resigned following a spell of just three months at the job. He remains co-head of parent EADS .

Gallois said Airbus' cost-cutting measures would have to be evenly split between its French and German operations. He added that Airbus now had a more simplified management structure than before because of his double role.

1 comment:

  1. An Elephant Crackup?

    I thought back to a moment in Queen Elizabeth National Park this past June. As Nelson Okello and I sat waiting for the matriarch and her calf to pass, he mentioned to me an odd little detail about the killing two months earlier of the man from the village of Katwe, something that, the more I thought about it, seemed to capture this particularly fraught moment we’ve arrived at with the elephants. Okello said that after the man’s killing, the elephant herd buried him as it would one of its own, carefully covering the body with earth and brush and then standing vigil over it.

    Even as we’re forcing them out, it seems, the elephants are going out of their way to put us, the keepers, in an ever more discomfiting place, challenging us to preserve someplace for them, the ones who in many ways seem to regard the matter of life and death more devoutly than we. In fact, elephant culture could be considered the precursor of our own, the first permanent human settlements having sprung up around the desire of wandering tribes to stay by the graves of their dead. ‘‘The city of the dead,’’ as Lewis Mumford once wrote, ‘‘antedates the city of the living.’’

    When a group of villagers from Katwe went out to reclaim the man’s body for his family’s funeral rites, the elephants refused to budge. Human remains, a number of researchers have observed, are the only other ones that elephants will treat as they do their own. In the end, the villagers resorted to a tactic that has long been etched in the elephant’s collective memory, firing volleys of gunfire into the air at close range, finally scaring the mourning herd away.

    ReplyDelete