Two heads are better than one - except at the top of a single company. As EADS, Europe's leading aerospace group, plunges deeper into crisis, its dual management structure is once again under fire. Add to that the relationship with Airbus and shareholder arrangements that make the French government influential but not decisive, and it begins to look like a case study of a corporate mess. Tidying it up should now be a matter of urgency.

The current form of EADS owes less to management theory than to history books. The Franco-German group was created in 2000 as a further step in the consolidation of national aerospace industries. From the start, it had two chairmen and two chief executives, one of each nationality. Its reporting lines were based on German heads of division reporting to the French chief executive, and vice versa.