Is it possible that, at last, it’s all finally come home to roost?
It has taken an enormous and very public corporate management failure to finally expose it.
This week British Airways, a major British corporation where one would expect the cream of management talent to reside was brutally exposed as a totally inadequate organization completely lacking in any kind of management expertise at the highest levels.
Alongside it is an equally large and allied organization (BAA) that has also been tried, tested and found to be completely wanting.
How is it that Britain, once the centre of the industrial revolution and the leader in world industry has declined to such a pitiful state?
Several reasons but let us concentrate on the demise of the apprenticeship system caused mainly by corporate greed and government inadequacy.
For many years boys and girls, fresh from school, were given a thorough training in every aspect of their chosen industry. This was paid for by industry itself. Not that it actually cost industry a great deal. Many parents supported their children during the apprenticeship process, wages paid to apprentices were minimal and for the most part the ‘book learning’ was provided as a cost sharing exercise between the companies themselves.
I went through such a process. When I left school I initially worked for an insurance company as a junior clerk. The first thing the company arranged was day release to attend classes that would eventually lead to me obtaining the necessary qualifications to continue a career in insurance.
As it turned out I chose an alternate career path and went to sea with the Orient Line – a forerunner of today’s airlines carrying passengers to Australia. I was just 17 when I left the UK on my first 6 month voyage to Australia and back. Over the next two years, as a Cadet, I worked in every department on the ship – the laundry and linen room, printers shop, storerooms, butchers shop and galley. I washed dishes in the plate house, I served tables in the dining room, I made up passenger cabins, I stood watches in the engine room and on the ships bridge.
After 2 years in a boiler suit I was promoted to a (very) junior officer.
Colin Marshall of British Airways was also an Orient Line Cadet and underwent exactly the same training.
I later put my training to good use in the deserts of Saudi Arabia. Colin Marshall went on to do great things for British Airways. Such a pity that all the good he was able to do along with Lord King has gone to waste.
Compare that to Willie Walsh and his like. Sure, he was a pilot which means that he was capable of accepting ultimate responsibility (I assume he did make it to the left hand seat). But being a pilot does not mean that you actually know what goes into the day to day running of an airline.
Did he spend a couple of months (each) working on check-in, humping baggage, dealing with passenger complaints, storing, provisioning and cleaning aircraft? Did he actually spend time as a member of the cabin crew? Did he spend time in Operations learning the complexities of scheduling and routing, fuelling and clearances?
I think not and in that massive, missing level of hands dirty experience he will probably be joined by the majority of the people he surrounds himself with as ‘managers’.
This is a norm and it is little wonder that the people at the front-end of many industries despise management so much.
Little wonder that Terminal 5 happened.
Last edited by Xeque; 30th Mar 2008 at 17:20.