Summit Notebook

L-3 CEO Strianese finds crawling around airplanes fun

Michael Strianese, President and CEO of L-3 Communications Holdings Inc., is a roll up the sleeves kind of guy who likes nothing better than a close-up look at airplanes and wiring and sensors. And he’s not even an engineer.

“What do I like to do? I like to get down on the factory floor with the guys and crawl around airplanes and look at wiring and figure out how things work. So for somebody with a finance background, I think that surprises people,” he said at the Reuters Aerospace and Defense Summit.

“I think what might surprise people is I spend a lot of time developing some of the technical solutions on our unmanned systems that we developed internally over the last couple of years,” he said.

The company CEO has had a personal hand in the systems for the Viking 400, Mobius and Project Liberty aircraft.

It might not be fun for an engineer to come into the company’s chief financial officer’s office and deal with numbers and paper — “It’s a lot more fun to crawl around with wires and sensors and things and watch how things work,” Strianese says.

“I just don’t run the company from sitting at a desk in New York City, I really do like to get out and touch and feel the products and meet the people,” he said.  

“And I think our folks that do the work like seeing some of the corporate folks around and recognize that we’re regular people too.”

Divorced defense giants reunited in Reuters office

It might well have been the business divorce of the year, but it seems there are no hard feelings between the heads of defense contractors Northrop Grumman and jilted European partner EADS.

The companies had been bidding together to challenge Boeing for a deal worth up to $50 billion to supply aerial tankers to the Air Force. But Northrop pulled out in March leaving EADS, the Franco-German parent company of Airbus, to bid alone.

The two companies’ chief executives crossed paths in the Reuters Washington bureau as they took consecutive speaker spots at an annual Reuters symposium on the aerospace industry.

Frenchman Louis Gallois, the chief executive of EADS, put his arm around Northrop’s Wes Bush and said “Just married!”

It was a light moment of relief in one of the most bitterly fought defense procurement sagas of recent decades.

But Bush is not laughing his way back to the altar yet.

“I will tell you there is not a single moment since we made that decison that I have felt any regret,” Bush said at the Reuters Aerospace and Defense Summit.

Northrop Grumman chief sees message in moving HQ to East Coast

Northrop Grumman CEO and President Wes Bush (no relation to the former president) says there’s a message in moving the company headquarters across the country to a suburb of  Washington from Los Angeles.

“I absolutely believe it’s something that we need to do and will be very good for our company,” Bush said at a Reuters Aerospace and Defense Summit.

“To be direct about it, this is one of the smaller operations that we’re moving in the company. We say yes it’s a very important operation, it’s the corporate headquarters, but it’s several hundred people out of 120,000 people in the corporation.”

The company’s headquarters will move to Falls Church, Virginia, with the goal of starting operations at its new location in summer 2011. Northrop has gone through the process of identifying who will move and which jobs will be filled with local hires, Bush said. 

“We’re a company that manages programs and so we’re running this like a program.”

The initial announcement about moving to the East Coast from the West Coast came as a surprise to many, but Bush, who took the helm of the firm in January, says it did get a certain message across.

“I’m not sure I’d measure it in popularity,” he said.

Lockheed Martin bracing for a new reality

Lockheed Martin CEO Robert Stevens says despite cost cutting, the defense industry will survive based on new global security needs and adds that Lockheed’s portfolio is well positioned for change.

EADS chief longs for airplane that is no longer

What would you guess is the airplane that the head of  the company that produces the Airbus longs for?

Think fast and past.

“Concorde,” Louis Gallois, EADS Chairman and CEO, says without hesitation. “It’s a dream.”

The supersonic plane, built in some of the factories that now produce the bulky Airbus A380 super jumbo, made its last commercial flight from New York to London on Oct. 24, 2003.

The supersonic trip would typically take about 3-1/2 hours, cutting the travel time in about half for busy company executives.

“I am a fan of supersonic airplanes. I have taken the Concorde three or four times, it was a fantastic airplane,” Gallois says at the Reuters Aerospace and Defense Summit.

“But, you know, that is the past. And I regret that our industry is no longer interested in supersonic airplanes, we are not working on it, but it’s a personal regret,” he said with a touch of wistfulness.

Boeing Defense President Muilenburg on mixing business with cycling

Boeing Defense, Space and Security President and CEO Dennis Muilenburg speaks eloquently about defense cycles, but did you know that he is something of a cyclist who typically rides about 100 miles a week?

The give away was the glowing tan he was sporting when speaking at the Reuters Aerospace and Defense Summit.

“I’m an avid bicyclist so I catch some sun while I’m out bicycling,” he said.

Muilenburg doesn’t bike to work but he goes for a spin on the weekend and has a few bicycles parked in his garage. His favorite is a Trek 5900, which other cycling aficianados say is lightweight and speedy.

“That’s my composite frame bike that I use for a lot of my long-distance rides,” Muilenburg says with a smile.

And there is a way to mix business with pleasure, as he explains how he’s incorporated his love for cycling with a Boeing fitness program.

“One of the things we’re doing right now is investing in our people, what we call a people first, people fit program,” Muilenburg says. “Part of that is investing in employee well-being, so quite frequently I travel to a site and do a 20 or 30-mile ride with the team. And then occasionally I do a long distance ride that’s in the 100 to 200 mile range.”

Lockheed CEO Stevens says he learns a thing or two from new generation

Lockheed Martin Corp. CEO Robert Stevens, who turns 59 years old tomorrow, says he learns every day from the new generation at the defense company he heads — although he still doesn’t IM.

The son of a Pennsylvania steelworker who enlisted in the Marines instead of college, later completing  his education on the GI program, says, “I am one of the luckiest people you are going to meet.”

And he revels in the different approaches to solving problems that employees from different generations bring to the table. 

“I go to leadership training every day,” he said at the Reuters Aerospace and Defense Summit.

“And part of the people who train me are the recent college graduates who tell me what their view of the world is. Because it’s not only a different view, the way they solve problems is very different than the way people I went to college with solve problems. It’s fascinating.”

For instance, “their use of technology, the way they communicate with one another, is entirely different,” Stevens says, punctuating his comments with hand gestures.

As part of the Baby Boom generation, Stevens says he’s used to participating in a lot of meetings. “Today’s younger employees, they don’t have a lot of meetings. They’ll use Instant Messaging, I don’t.”

AIA CEO Blakey says she’s got Jet-A in her veins

Aerospace Industries Association Chief Executive Officer Marion Blakey says when she started working on aviation issues earlier in her career she was hooked.

She has held a number of prominent positions in Washington that emphasized transportation and safety.

“If you sort of want to look at the thread, that’s the thread,” Blakey said in an interview at the Reuters Aerospace and Defense Summit.

“And it took me into aviation. And you get Jet-A  in your veins and it’s over,” she said with a laugh.  (For those not in the know Jet-A is jet fuel.)

“It’s pretty addictive.”

Blakey took her interest in transportation safety to a level not seen by most people and was head of the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board during the Bush administration.

“Life is a series of opportunities and you rarely see yourself as others see you,” Blakey said. “It’s building on strengths, personal characteristics, and interests and training. But it all comes together often in things that there’s no way to predict.”

EADS O’Keefe sees corporate life similarities to government, academia

He’s been head of NASA, the Navy, and Louisiana State University and spent practically his whole professional life in either government or academia.

So when it came time for the next step on a varied career path, Sean O’Keefe broke from the past and chose the corporate route.

Since Nov. 1 he has been EADS North America’s chief executive officer and seems quite comfortable in just six weeks rattling off the company’s position on 373 requirements for a Pentagon tanker contract.

In an interview at a Reuters Aerospace and Defense Summit, O’Keefe said he found similarities among the corporate, government and academic sectors.

“It is a terrific opportunity to bring a different perspective from that checkered background of experiences to a set of opportunities,” he said.

“There are common elements to it,” O’Keefe said. “It’s very much how do you look at technology choices and where your confidence is and how do you want to pursue that for market opportunities. It’s all just different ways of defining it.”

But there is one difference, and it’s a big one — the quarterly earnings report card for publicly traded companies.

Would you send a postcard of Boeing’s new Dreamliner?

For some fans, Boeing’s first test flight of its new 787 Dreamliner this week was apparently a virtual postcard.

The aerospace company says people sent about 25,000 postcards electronically of the lightweight commercial plane made primarily from carbon-based plastics and titanium.

About 1 million people logged in to watch the take-off and landing, observing the long-delayed first flight from about 13,000 cities and about 200 countries, the company says.

Dennis Muilenburg, chief executive officer of Boeing Defense Systems, watched from St. Louis — about 2,000 road miles from Seattle where the flight happened — in a Webcast meeting with about 100 employees who had a live feed from the event.

“I can tell you we all took great pride in seeing that first airplane get into the air. And I’ve been working in this business for 20-some years and one of the best things about this business is being able to witness a first flight. There’s nothing else like it,” Muilenburg said in a telephone interview at a Reuters Aerospace and Defense Summit.

“And yesterday’s event just reinforced one of the great aspects of our business, and that’s being able to see a first flight. I saw it virtually yesterday, but I can tell you we all paused to enjoy the moment,” he said.