SOPS:
Can I put my hand up? I will do it for $300000. I will shut down Jetstar, bring some of the fleet back into mainline, order some proper aircraft for mainline, open up some routes and inspire the staff. Oh and I forgot, sack most of management.
It can't be hard.
I believe that there is a simple Two year strategic plan sitting in someones drawer to do something like just that.
However we are following the old maxim; "If its not broke, don't try to fix it, or otherwise break it first and then fix it".
Qantas has been broken, deliberately, by a half assed Asian expansion plan that has zero chance of success, implemented by an incompetent, narcissistic and top heavy management bent on feathering their own nests.
By all means, play tough with unions and pilots, develop a reputation for being a tightarse, but play fair and inflict on your own management ranks what you presribe for the rest of the staff.
If it was me, I'd kil off the Asian ventures and indeed roll Jetstar and everything else into mainline. I'd jettison "The Qantas Group" abomination immediately because more importantly than cutting management numbers, I want to get rid of the "group" thinking because it works against achieving economies of scale. There are to be no cross subsidies unless appproved at Board level and there is to be one set of cost allocation rules applied across the airline that are as close as possible to accounting best practice
I want One airline and a "we are all in this together" attitude. I would ruthlessly get rid of sub optimisation wherever I could find it and make sure that decision criteria reflect the "one in all in" approach. LCC competition can be handled by having Two levels of economy travel.
I would implement HR policies to root out the narcissists that infest the place and dictate that NO ONE gets a supervisory or management position without real airline experience at the coal face in whatever area they aspire to manage.
I would also mandate (and this is my own invention I think) a longer term strategy to provide a spectrum of ages in management ranks - from 65+year greybeards to up and coming Twenty somethings- no more of management coming from one or Two age cohorts - people have different strengths and weaknesses as they age and the best way to protect an organisation is to blend the ages and experience.
Then we start bringing back maintenance to where we can effectively control it - Australia. Then we start looking very very hard at everything we have outsourced. Are we convinced that we are getting absolutely the best possible value for money? What do our customers think about the services our outsourcing partners supply?
Then we start looking at exactly why and how the fleet got to the state its in and start planning again.
Put together a management team something like that with a Board and Chairman who agree with the strategy and watch Qantas take off!
I could go on.......