Originally Posted by
AerialPerspective
No, the rot started with the fellow wearing the bow tie.
He started outsourcing, he started paying executives (starting with himself) millions of dollars per annum, he treated older Qantas staff like they were crap and brought in cronies from his TAA days who did dumb things like moving the ops to T4 at LHR when 90% of in and out traffic was transfers to T2 and T1 (why? because he'd gotten rid of all the international expertise) and a host of other things, cost millions and had to be put back to how it was within a few years, one of the cronies had to resign for sending company work to their own consultancy. Thankfully the BA people on the board had some influence and we ended up with QUBE, not that excuse for a system, the toy LDP and TAARSAN.
He wanted the name of the company changed to something else. He brought Dixon in, Dixon brought Joyce in.
No, the rot started with Mr bow tie.
I remember shortly after he started, a delay with a braking system problem, and it took a day to solve because under Mr Bow Tie, the brakes and wheel servicing had been outsourced and, happy to be corrected on this, I believe that included selling the items themselves.
Under him, Sydney Airport got a GM who allegedly sat at his desk with barefeet in a sandbox in his office and wanted to start meetings with a singalong.
No matter what anyone thought of older Qantas management, if you'd suggested anything like that, they'd throw you out of the building.
With all due respect to the misfortune of departing early from this earth, no one deserves that and I wouldn't have wished it upon even him, but there was more than a grain of truth in the joke that went around in the latter half of the 1990s "What have Qantas and McDonald's got in common?" Answer, "both run by a clown with a bow tie".
It saddens me that there were so many pioneering executives that were part of Qantas, many CEOs through the 70s and 80s and who gets their name on an aeroplane? No Ron Yates, no Bert Richie, guess who?
What I'd say about Dixon and Joyce is that the line had been pushed so far by their immediate predecessor where nothing was sacred any more that they were able to just step over it without anyone noticing - the proverbial frog in the boiling water.
Sack the board, put John F (Tubby) Ward in as Chair if he wants it, let him pick the rest of the board and the CEO. Let the company's direction and repair be under the influence of someone who was probably the last CEO who 'loved' the company and was quite happy to be paid a 'mere' $250K per annum.
AND, let's adopt the German idea of making it mandatory to have an employee on the Board of Directors. Seems to work wonderfully well there.