The consulting model I had inflicted on me - "Business transformation" is a carte blanche for a consulting company to look at and tamper with every aspect of the business from HR to operations and make a very great deal of money in the process.
A competent consulting company will bring in so called "experts" from all over their global network: "honey cart operations? Why our Mr Snodgrass from Alabama did a major report on airline waste disposal Two years ago, we will have him on the next flight out!" You get the drift?
The let out clause the consultants use is also always the same: To make the new lean mean transformed machine they have created work as advertised, your business must totally abandon the "old thinking" and "Old culture" this is code for disposing of ALL legacy people and practices completely.
The justification for this is that if it isn't done this way; "the old culture will infect the new culture with bad thinking and kill it". By way of trivial example, this means that if you have designed a paperless office system, you must prevent the possession of paper and pencils in order to prevent people from returning to their previous practice of scrawling notes to each other.
Naturally a halfway prudent Board and Management will reject the idea of complete reliance on untested people on practices and retain a modicum of "old thinkers" - thereby giving the consultants an escape clause when things go bad: "You didn't completely embrace the new systems, which is why they failed".
In the case of Qantas, it seems to me that the management has been deliberately chosen to make it fail, or at least make it totally unattractive to all but a handful of shareholders. so that it can be snapped up by private operators.
To put that another way, a very, very successful investor told me his method of investing: he did his own due diligence - looking for undervalued and very badly managed companies. He would then invest in them. What happened invariably was that the rest of the market finally caught on that the only problem was that company was very badly managed, they bought in, turfed out the management and voila! A nice little return on investment! It would seem that a variant of this strategy is being employed today.
To put that another way, you cannot tell me that 65% of the Australian domestic air travel market is a losing proposition.