When Alan Joyce was interviewed by the online newsletter
Business Spectator - Reading Joyce - Alan Kohler it was done at Building A in Coward Street Mascot – rather than the swank new Deutsche Bank building in Hunter Street.
He is also removing 500 managers from Qantas. This is an astonishing number. It says that despite a reputation for toughness and cost control, Geoff Dixon had excessive layers of management and in some ways was not a good manager at all.
Of interest was Alan Kohler’s comment regarding a senior Qantas pilot he spoke to at the weekend who had reported that all of the airline’s pilots are enthusiastic about the cultural change that Alan Joyce is bringing with him. He said he would be prepared to take a pay cut if it was clearly for the good of the company (no pilot would ever have done that for Dixon, he says).
The pilot said they always knew there were too many managers at Qantas, and that Geoff Dixon had allowed a seat-warming culture to develop; removing 500 managers is a clear acknowledgement of that by the company.
The engineers have been as unhappy as the pilots; the IT systems are dysfunctional; Qantas’s reputation for on-time performance is appalling (even though, as Joyce says, the actual performance has picked up lately).
The main task, which Alan Joyce obviously understands, is to change the culture at a company that has become arrogant, complacent and over-staffed.”