I don’t think you had to know much about Delta Airlines to see this one coming. Rising star James Whitehurst has just resigned from his COO position at Delta Airlines. My hunch is that this will hurt Delta more than many think it will and that odds are pretty good that we’ll see Whitehurst at the helm of a company pretty soon. Richard Anderson looks to be a good choice for Delta, but no one likes to be passed over, especially for an outsider. I think a lot of people were expecting Delta to choose someone from their own bench given the depth that they have. Ah, but who knows what goes on in those boardrooms once the doors are closed?

Whitehurst’s bio (from Delta’s website):

Jim Whitehurst, 38, is Chief Operating Officer. He is responsible for Operations, Sales and Customer Service, Network and Revenue Management, Marketing, and Corporate Strategy.

A native of Columbus, Ga., Whitehurst graduated from Rice University in Houston, Texas, with a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Economics. He also attended Friedrich-Alexander University in Erlangen, Germany, holds a general course degree from the London School of Economics and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

CNBC just had a live update from Toulouse, France, that EADS, parent company of Airbus, has announced that they have abandoned their dual-CEO, dual-chairman structure, naming Louis Gallois, of France, as the CEO of EADS and Ruediger Grube, of Germany, as the Chairman, while Thomas Enders, also German, will assume the role of CEO of Airbus. The AP news article can be found here.

This is almost certainly a long overdue move, and quite frankly, EADS should have been smart enough to never set up such a structure to begin with. I believe that most execs would aggree that “co-” anything is almost always a bad idea, as “by committee” is a corporate euphemism for indecisive, unaccountable, and just generally bad.

This is a timely news item for me, as I just started reading John Newhouse’s Boeing Versus Airbus, and the EADS corporate structure is discussed in Chapter 1.

What will be the impact of this? In theory, it should allow for a more decisive EADS that can enact changes more quickly. However, only time will tell, and I suspect that, given EADS multi-national interests, the turf wars are not over and Mr. Gallois will still have his politicking cut out for him.