Gillegan
I agree 100%. It seems to be the fate of many companies or personalities, that when blessed with a stellar rise and success, they succumb to the assumption, that this was only due to their own superior skills. That other factors might have helped, like being at the right place at the right time, having had some precious help from motivated co-warriors, mistakes from competitors (!!!) or just pure luck, is simply discarded.
This is called arrogance (definition: an attitude of superiority manifested in an overbearing manner or in presumptuous claims or assumptions) and it makes people blind to their own mistakes. For them, any setback must be of foreign making or of a mean conspiracy.
This arrogance has taken down many companies and associations. Recently it's FIFA, Samsung and VW, where in all cases the experts talk of a rotten company culture. Look how hard it is for these companies to change, but without getting rid of the heads, it never succeeds.
For a company in the ME, with its Islamic background, it will be nearly impossible to go down that road. What history would demand, is not only the resignation of the most direct culprit at the front (AAR), which could mean a slight improvement but no change in company culture, but the departure of STC and even HHSA. The amount of employee mismanagement and wrong strategic fleet and expansion decisions can not have been missed by him, thus he is part of the arrogance that put EK on the slide.
This is, and that is my guess, not possible. Even if HHSM realises the abyss and the reason for it, he is just as much part of the local culture and unable to change it.
EK will shrink to the irrelevance of Gulf Air and most probably be replaced by Qatar, which will eventually fall in the same trap in a few years. After all they are all ME companies, led by locals.
Last edited by glofish; 15th Oct 2016 at 06:31.