'Per hours worked, I am not the highest paid employee in the company, the A380 captains are''.
Quite the candid admission. Perhaps our captains of industry could learn quite alot from our captains of aircraft. They walk the walk on the important stuff.
A pilot as CEO? Well, they know about leadership. The aircraft and crew go where the captain directs it. Willingly. There's no "Do as I say, not as I do" on the flight deck. Captains lead by example, they take the passengers and crew with them, and they arrive at the destination together. Why? Because they have utmost faith in the captain's skill, experience and decision-making capabilities. Captains take responsibility for their errors and actively work to share those errors to prevent others making them. They don't allow mistakes to keep repeating every decade or so as a new tranche of F/Os come through with the latest theory from flight school - one that differs little from the tried and failed theory of a decade past. The fundamental laws of aerodynamics do not change, and the Civil Aviation Regulations are written in the blood and tears of hard-earned experience. There is no getting clever with lift, thrust, weight and drag, weather, pay-loads vs fuel-loads or alternate airports. The same is true of good leadership and business management. Forget all the seasonal, trendy, frilly add-ons. The core attributes of successful and respected leaders have been constant since the time of the Pharaohs. These attributes are found in every captain.
A pilot as head of "People"? Their stock-in-trade is crew resource management. Think about that phrase for a moment: "CREW" implies teamwork; "RESOURCE" implies that every single member of the crew has something important to add; "MANAGEMENT" implies making and acting on decisions to best ulitise the resources each crew member provides, not writing them off as rogues and kamikazes. Someone misbehaves? Hit them with a truncheon with due force to subdue the threat, handcuff them to the seat and hand them to the Police on arrival. No matter who the offender is. "Officer, this man's actions (insert appropriate choice from below here) endangered the aircraft".
Choices: cartel behaviour; erosion of shareholder value; failing to pay a dividend; poor fleet, route and timing decisions; failed outsourcing initiatives; giving away routes; creative accountancy etc etc etc.
A pilot as CFO? When a pilot works out his weight and balance and fuel required for a mission, there is only one correct answer. A pilot gets paid when he safely lands the aircraft. The passengers safely land with him. He doesn't operate in a little module called "underlying profits" that is completely detached from the reality of the main hull called "shareholder returns" - where his bonus is based on safely landing the little module and to hell with the flaming wreck of the main hull.
And as far as adequate recompense, "per hours work" are weasel words. A captain is not a brickie. He is a highly trained, highly experienced individual who brings a helluva lot more to the equation than "hours worked". A captain has to make his decisions in the blink of an eye at 30,000 feet and 1,000km/h in a pressurised metal and composite tube consisting of over a million sub-components assembled into numerous systems operating in harmony to keep said tube in the air and his passengers and crew alive. He usually makes his decisions in consultation with one other person of lesser experience but a part of the team all the same. And he has to make the RIGHT decision EVERY time. Where do you get to make your decisions? A plush office surrounded by "the best"(
) advice of your executive team. You get to go home and sleep on your decisions. Your poor decisions don't result in your own death and those of your 400 or more passengers and crew. The consequences for you are you receive $3 million instead of $5.1 million. You'll merely be forgotten as a mediocrity or remembered for the wrong reasons if your decisions are particularly poor. Poor you if you f*ck it up.
We the staff will follow the right leader to hell and back. A leader who shows respect, compassion and understanding for his people. A leader who recognises and takes responsibility for the poor decisions of the past, even if those decisions were not his own. A leader who acts in the best interests of ALL employees. A leader with the force of personality to convince others of the rightness of his decisions, and to bring others with him on the journey. A leader who treats all people equally, not based on their position in the hierarchy. Guaranteed if I drove drunk on the tarmac and racially abused a colleague, or bashed on my manager's door late at night to hand-deliver the latest notice of PIA... I'd be out on my ear. Not in this man's Qantas.