Captain Gidday:
How nice it is, on a day when it seems the whole financial system is turning to crud, to touch base with PPRuNe and realise that the truly important things in life, such as OW's hair, are still to the fore in people's minds and thoughts. Quite stabilising, really.
Oh good! Another one to play with..........
You obviously haven't learnt much about human nature Captain Gidday. Let me tell you why Olivia fails, and fails badly, on at least three levels. Please note, this is nothing personal about Olivia, I'm sure she is a lovely person when one gets to know her, likes dogs and kittens, etc.:
1. Perceptions are Reality When Livvy stands in front of the camera she
is Qantas. Ninety percent of communication is non verbal. It takes the form of appearance, manner, gesture, dress, eye movements, accent, intonation and so on.
She doesn't appear to understand that and neither does her employer. She has no telegenic authority. She could however be trained to do that.
2. She does not have mastery of either her topic or its delivery.
There are Qantas cabin crew who could do a better job.
3.
Olivia does not meet the same dress and deportment standards that Cabin Crew are required to meet. That is both a slap in the face for every CC employee, but it is at variance with the perception that Qantas would obviously wish to project to the general public - cool calm, masterly and professional.
To put that another way what would I think of Qantas if I saw Captain Gidday passing through Customs outbound - dirty shoes, fly undone, shirt tail hanging out, food stained jacket, bad haircut, tie askew and loudly telling an off colour joke to similarly dishevelled FO?
Olivia may be very good at schmoozing politicians and journalists, however as a TV personality/spokesperson, she is a disaster, and don't try and tell me it is a generation X thing. I fail to understand why Qantas appointed her to this role when there were obviously much better qualified candidates with real Government experience who could have done the job standing on their ear- for example I happen to know that the chap below was just itching for the job. He would have been the perfect embodiment of Qantas today:
