Originally Posted by
MelbourneFlyer
I agree 100% and the exact same 'shop floor' support seemed to apply to Paul Scurrah, he seemed super popular across the ranks at Virgin Australia, certainly much more so than John Borghetti. Qantas could certainly do with a big dose of that 'bringing people together' spirit from its next set of leaders.
They got it in the mid-80s when John Menadue came along - things changed really quickly in terms of what in modern management speak 'engagement'. What he did was simple, but seems to elude most current management - he just asked the people that do the work "What works and what doesn't work and you do the job so you tell us how to best do it".
IMHO JB was incompetent. People were running around making dumb moves and decisions not based on logic but because 'he' wanted it that way. I am aware of the supposed basis of some of the decisions he made and they were incorrect. I cannot see that anything that John Thomas did was worthy of his departure, except that he disagreed with the mail room boy. From all accounts Scurrah was very quickly able to establish a good rapport with the coalface and I liked that he slaughtered a few of the MRB's sacred cows such as emphatically refusing to ever have positioning Tech Crew in J Class but thinking that his a-rse was somehow required to be there.
The right CEO can keep a business profitable while motivating the people very quickly. It's not hard to do, it just takes forthrightness and doing what you say you're going to do. The problems of VA were always subjected, when someone came up with a good idea, the response 'there's a project underway to look at that' - which of course, there never was, it was just a fob-off.