Amongst all of the enterprises I have seen in the countries that I travelled, the most impressing was the Airbus A380 assembly line in Toulouse France. This assembly line is the place where all the parts of A380, that are produced in different countries and by different teams are assembled, final tests are performed and the final products are handed over to the customer. The impressing part of the assembly line was the multinational structure rather than the technological supremacy. The work that was shared throughout the Europe could be seen in that hangar in such a way that Spanish engineers, German engineers, British engineers that were hosted by French engineers were all making evaluations on their own parts. 6 languages were spoken in the factory and in some areas the engineers were allowed to speak only their own language.
Nowadays multinational initiatives are common and furthermore there are nearly no big scale projects that are not undertaken by multi-national initiatives. All the industries carry out their projects in similar climates. But the main difference of the assembly line I observed was its being a pure representative of the situation. A representative that travels the world flying and anyone can experience at least as a passenger.
The other thing that impressed me was not its success in aviation or engineering but the fact that it shows us what we can achieve when we structure the appropriate organisation by minimizing the initiative’s internal conflicts and providing an appropriate collaboration environment. There can be other products that can compete or be better than it in terms of performance. If there is not any now, there will be in the future. If we only consider the engineering success, it may also not be the best product. But when we consider the ability of cooperation further than the engineering criteria I think it is the pioneer of our time.
Although it was established to defeat its American competitor, it has the speciality to be the product of the cooperation of the countries belonging to a continent, which are very different in culture, language and even further which beared hostility to each other. When we think of it as a reference to a worldwide initiative further than the continent itself, it is not hard to imagine what we can achieve.
Great things of course can not be achieved easily. Europe could not have come to this point without living through the sad days and mistakes that are done in the past. It is mandatory to go through such dismal times in order to achieve nice products and nice times. There is no short-cut to achieve this kind of big dreams but it is a must to act in accordance with the ethics in order to minimize the hazards. If we do not try to achieve these goals in line with ethics, even if they are achieved, life makes us compensate for these ethic rules that are broken. It constructs the sequence of events in a way that we should start from the beginning. And in an out of ordinary and miraculous way!
As a conclusion, today, we need global projects which will take place above all nations, flags and identities, and being in line with ethics in carrying out of these projects more than ever. And our advantage is that a product such as A380 which will serve all of the globe has proved this theory without leaving place for any speculation or chance of criticism. From now on we have no reasons other than our own artificial ones to put the competition to background and try to embody projects that will increase welfare and serve to all mankind.