More On Boeing's 787 Design Process

From the Seattle Times last year (h/t nc links):

Albaugh and other senior leaders within Boeing may be belatedly paying attention to a paper presented at an internal company symposium in 2001 by John Hart-Smith, a world-renowned airplane structures engineer.
Hart-Smith, who had worked for Douglas Aircraft and joined Boeing when it merged in 1997 with McDonnell Douglas, was one of the elite engineers designated within the company as Senior Technical Fellows.
His paper was a biting critique of excessive outsourcing, a warning to Boeing not to go down the path that had led Douglas Aircraft to virtual obsolescence by the mid-1990s.
The paper laid out the extreme risks of outsourcing core technology and predicted it would bring massive additional costs and require Boeing to buy out partners who could not perform.
Albaugh said in the interview that he read the paper six or seven years ago, and conceded that it had "a lot of good points" and was "pretty prescient."
In his talk at Seattle U., the first specific lesson Albaugh cited as learned from the 787 debacle seemed to echo Hart-Smith's paper....
Taken to its extreme conclusion, Hart-Smith said mockingly, the strategy of maximizing return on net assets could lead Boeing to outsource everything except a little Boeing decal to slap on the nose of the finished airplane.
Though most of the profits would be outsourced to suppliers along with all the work, and all the company's expertise would wither away, the return on investment in a 25-cent decal could be 5,000 percent.
Has Boeing belatedly seen the light and embraced Hart-Smith's analysis?
Clearly the 787 has brought a serious rethink at the top.
"We went too much with outsourcing," Albaugh said in the interview. "Now we need to bring it back to a more prudent level."

I would like to know how much the poor labor relations with the engineers and machinists figured into the outsourcing of much of the project.  I'd wager it is a hell of a lot.  One of the worst impacts of labor unions over the years has been the way their presence drove management to absolutely stupid decisions to try to stick it to them.  It kind of reminds me how the Republican party allows President Obama's presence drive them completely insane, and causes them to destroy themselves.