The time horizon of these jokers is too short. If they had a 10 or even a 5 year risk horizon, they would not make these short-sighted decisions. The Welchian approach isn't just value destruction, over a longer time horizon it's quantifiably unprofitable for the business as a whole.
Forgive me a tangent here, particularly relevant with the 737, about how leaders regularly mistake economies of scope for economies of scale.
Scale and Scope are fundamentally different things, but M&A specialists and related finbros often treat them as equivalent. This is unfortunate. Scalar efficiencies are largely functions of density - more people buying the same thing over a given space. Scope involves equivalence - more people buying things that are just similar enough. This is a trap. In order to evaluate equivalence, you need domain knowledge, but in order to consolidate operations, you've already jettisoned that same domain knowledge. Also known as "Why do I need fuselage experts in three different places? It's just a tube! Let's just hire one outsourced Fuselage Expert".
Economy of Scope takes a truly heroic amount of domain knowledge among the M&A team to make it work, but if you're already convinced that finance contains the secrets of the universe, you're probably going to be dismissing domain knowledge as a basic concept.
Again - not for the first time - I marvel at the structural similarities of end-stage Soviet industry and our own late-stage financier capitalism.