I thought this comment posted by a UK Telegraph reader, relating to Lloyds Bank incompetence, could equally apply to an HK airlines' team.
"It is not the staff that cause these problems, but upper management; and it now affects almost all organizations, public and private. The root cause is incompetence, accented by outright stupidity. Upper managements now operate on the theory that financial, technical and service methods and decision-making must be removed from the people who perform these functions. Their reasoning is that it is cheaper to have a system that has as many low wage order-takers as possible, who are easily replaceable, and as few decision-makers as possible who are not so replaceable. This has three spectacular consequences.
1) Separating functional knowledge from decision-making makes actual operation of the business chaotic and immune from improvement.
2) The system gets designed to inherently delay and avoid decision-making because of the small number of decision-makers, who are now overwhelmed with work they are functionally incompetent to perform, and
3) competent employees are forced to follow incompetent instructions knowing full well that they are ineffective and counter-productive, and that they are literally powerless to oppose or overrule."
JW's latest tome also describes the joys of dealing with HSBC :
