Monthly Archives: August 2010

Once upon a time there was a business that constantly tried to put out fires using oil. The company didn’t know that oil doesn’t put out fires and it constantly wondered why the fires kept raging. So the business kept throwing more and more oil at its fires hoping that some day they would cease.

Sounds familiar?

This seems to be a prevalent syndrome in companies. Managers often attempt to solve problems by adding more resources, assuming that having more people on a team will, without any doubt, resolve all problems. When in reality the root of the problem is in the company’s management itself – not the team, not the project, not the customer, not the government, not the delivery boy, not the competitors, not the coffee – but management.

Adding more people to a disorganized project can only lead to confusion, reduced morale, dissatisfaction, and failure. With newcomers on the project, the existing team is implicitly told by management that “they can’t do the job, so we need other people in”. The newcomers on the other hand have no background information and history on the project, making their usefulness questionable, and leaving them also with lower morale in the long run. In the end, you’ll have disgruntled employees that no longer feel like contributing to the project and that will question their role in the company.

Management that fails to see this will end up “burning down the place”, because you can’t put out a fire by adding more oil to it. If the fire does get put out, it just means there is not a single bit of fuel left; all has turned to ashes.

Bad food in a plane, to a certain extent I can understand. But terrible food in airports, that just doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. I just can’t get my head around it. It’s as if the businesses in airports were preying on one-time only passengers: “these travelers are limited in what they can buy and they’ll probably never pass by here again, so who cares about providing them value. And while we’re at it, might as well put an insane price tag”.

That’s certainly no way of doing business. Perhaps they’ve forgotten that a good number of travelers do fly the same routes multiple times a year. Business travel is a big industry! In fact, the business travel spending in Canada from our American cousins alone totaled 1.4 billion$ in 2009(source). That’s a lot of money. Just for myself for instance I travel numerous times in the year, often passing by the same hubs, like the Vancouver airport. Well today I ate at a restaurant I wanted to try each time I passed by but never had the chance, and it was horrific. How can you get a stir-fry ginger chicken so wrong? Have they never even tried ginger chicken?

Rather than throwing poor value at high price in our faces, airport businesses could leverage the fact that travelers have little comfort and are away from home. Why not make them feel really comfortable and serve a real good meal with wonderful service. I’m not talking about fine cuisine here! Imagine the value. Imagine the growth opportunity. Imagine this restaurant quickly booming in every airport.

So who’s ready to invest a few millions on this with me?

To all of you who are traveling right now, have a wonderful trip.