Category: society

Heroes of Capitalism

When did it become acceptable for airlines to humiliate passengers and customers on national television?

The few times I watch television these days is either when the footy’s on or the rare occasions that I surface from my interweb connected man cave and stumble into a room where someone has a TV running.

And so it was tonight when I happened to wander out to witness a terrible airport “reality” show – this one being an unoriginal, third rate Australian effort where Tiger Airlines shows how it stuffs around and humiliates its passengers. In Australia, Channel Seven considers this to be prime-time TV “entertainment”.

What was striking about the show was how Tiger Airlines’ check in staff humiliated a pensioner and her young son who hadn’t printed out their boarding passes.

The “fee” for not carrying out a basic task which reasonable people would expect would be part of an airline’s service is $25 a head at Tiger Airlines – one could ask what the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s position is on excessive fees being used to pad airlines’, or banks’, profits but that would be asking too much of Canberra’s worlds best practice doughnut munchers.

As result the poor lady was expected to front up with another $50 – money she didn’t have. So Tiger Airlines’ check in staff wouldn’t let her board and Channel Seven’s camera crew gleefully filmed her desperate tears and shocked son.

Eventually a bystander took pity on her and gave her $60. At least someone in the terminal had some decency and compassion, qualities neither the Tiger Airlines staff or Channel Seven camera crew have in the tiniest way.

No doubt somewhere in an anonymous glass tower some arsehole has a job as a manager at Tiger Airlines and has a KPI that includes how many poor mothers they can reduce to tears.

When the arsehole Tiger Airlines manager gets its annual bonus for making the required number of victims passengers weep, it no doubt goes to lunch with the Channel Seven executives – another bunch of arseholes – to slap each others’ backs and tell themselves what great heroes of capitalism they are.

The question that bugs me is when did it become acceptable to humiliate your customers? No doubt Tiger Airlines think it’s good publicity and Channel Seven think it is good entertainment.

We live in interesting times when our business leaders think it isn’t good enough just to take customers’ money but that it’s also necessary to humiliate them as the managements of both Channel Seven and Tiger Airlines seem to be rewarded for doing.

Fortunately in these corporatist days we still can vote with our wallets and turn off the muck we find offensive – that’s why decent people shouldn’t choose to fly Tiger Airlines or watch Channel Seven.

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Shifting to a better return

Will rewarding passionate workers solve American business’ poor return on assets.

As part of Deloitte’s Building the Lucky Country series, the consulting firm had a briefing last week from John Hagel, co-chairman of Deloitte’s Silicon Valley Centre for the Edge, to discuss how industries are responding to shifts in the workplace and their markets.

John’s thesis is that businesses can be broadly split into into three groups; infrastructure, product innovation and customer relationship business which he covers in his Shift Index that looks at how industries are being affected by digital technologies.

Infrastructure businesses are high volume, transactional services like call centres, logistics and utilities companies.

The product innovators are those who develop new products, get them to market quickly and accelerating adoption of those goods.

Customer relationship businesses focus on understanding their clients and using that knowledge to add value.

Each of these business models require different mindsets and because most large companies try to do all three, they manage to do none well.

One of the results of this is a lousy Return On Assets, which Hagel says have fallen in the United States to one-third of the levels of 1965 and he doesn’t see this improving as the ‘competitive intensity’ of US markets increases.

A big feature of this decline in overall ROA is how the best performers have travelled compared to the laggards with the ‘winners’ barely maintaining their returns while the ‘losers’ are seeing their results declining dramatically.

How Hagel sees the solution to this poor performance is through rewarding creative and passionate workers better.

Firms have untapped opportunities to reverse their declining performance by embracing pull. To accomplish this, firms must develop and encourage passionate workers at every level of the organization.

Additionally, companies must tap into knowledge flows and expand the use of powerful tools, such as social software to solve operational/product problems more efficiently and effectively as well as to discover emerging opportunities.

If Hagel is right, it’s the businesses who want to micro-manage their workers while stifling innovation, initiative and creativity in their businesses who will be the great losers in this next decade as we move to the next phase of the ‘Big Shift’ where knowledge flows improve business performance.

Starting the process of dealing with these shifts involves understand what the DNA of your business really is; if it is a transactional infrastructure business then management needs to acknowledge this and not kid itself about being in customer relationships.

There are weakness in John Hagel’s proposition – one being that businesses can be easily pigeonholed into three categories.

Apple is a good example of this where a company that is clearly product focused has also shown it can be customer orientated with the success of the Apple Stores.

There’s also the question of why are there only three categories? In the breakdown the immediate thought is that there are businesses that don’t fit in any of these boxes. Legacy airlines or struggling motor manufacturers are good examples.

Despite the criticism, John and the Center For The Edge have some good points about the future of business and it’s something we’ll explore more over the next few weeks.

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Mosquitoes of the Internet

Stupid people have rights too and the Internet allows them to exercise those rights.

Sydney Morning Herald urban affairs columinst Elizabeth Farrelly recently fell foul of one the big fish that inhabits the shallow, stagnant intellectual pond that passes for Australia’s right wing intelligentsia.

As a result, Elizabeth found her personal blog infested with insulting comments from the Big Fish’s Internet followers.

What focused their ire was Elizabeth complaining about a delivery truck parked across a bike lane. A bit like this genius.

The funny thing with the righteous defence of the poor truck driver’s rights to privacy and blocking cycleways is where it the driveways to the gated communities for self-righteous and entitled self retirees that these commenters inhabit were blocked in a same way many of them would be reaching for the blood pressure pills.

One of the great things about the Internet is that it allows all of us to have our say without going through the gatekeepers of the newspaper letters editor or talkback radio producer.

The down side with this is that it gives everyone a voice, including the selfish and stupid – the useful idiots so adored by history’s demagogues.

Luckily today’s Australian demagogues aren’t too scary and the armies of useful idiots they can summon are more likely to rattle their zimmer frames than throwing Molotov cocktails or burning the shops of religious minorities.

Most of these people posting anonymous, spiteful and nasty comments are really just cowards. In previous times their ranting and bullying would be confined to their family or the local pub but today they have a global stage to spout their spite.

These people are the irritating mosquitoes of the web and they are the cost of having a free and vibrant online society.

It’s difficult to have a system where only nice people with reasonable views that we agree with can post online. All we can do is ignore the noisy idiot element as the irritations they are.

This is a problem too for businesses as these ratbags can post silly and offensive comments not just on your website but also on Facebook pages, web forums and other online channels.

Recently we’ve had a lot of talk about Internet trolls, notable in the discussion is how the mainstream media has missed the point of trolling – it’s about getting a reaction from the target. In that respect The Big Fish and his army of eager web monkeys have succeeded.

The good thing for Elizabeth is her page views will have gone through the roof. That’s the good side of having the web’s lunatic fringe descend upon your site.

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Risk free fallacies

Can we really build a risk free world?

One of the conceits of the late Twentieth Century was that we can engineer risk out of our lives.

Derivatives like Collateral Debt Obligations were thought to overcome financial risks, think contracts would eliminate business risks and wise central banks would massage the economic cycle to banish the risks of economic crises.

In schoolyards, the kids are banned from doing cartwheels and playing ball games – in response to a recent edict prohibiting physical activity at a local school an education department spokesman said the ban was to prevent, and not in response to, playground injuries.

So nothing’s happened to provoke a ban, just someone decided there was risk and the first reaction is to eliminate it rather than manage it.

In a litigious society where a culture of blame has developed this reaction is understandable. If a kid gets hurt in the playground then the parents might blame the teacher and one should be under no illusion that in the NSW state education system, the industrial concerns of teachers will always trump the welfare of students.

So the cartwheels must stop.

The strange thing with our culture of blame is that when something goes seriously wrong, such as the implosion of the banking system due to greed and misunderstanding of risk, no-one is held responsible.

For lawyers, this culture is understandable. After all, their job is to warn clients of legal risks and it’s true that every time we walk down the street or jump in our car we might make a mistake that could see us in court.

But we learn to manage that risk and we accept the odds every time we choose to drive down to the supermarket.

The danger in believing we can eliminate risk is that removing one element of risk often results in unexpected consequences – they are even more unexpected when you don’t understand the risks in the first place. CDOs and the shadow banking system are a good example of this.

Government seek to pass laws eliminating risks and in doing so create new risks, particularly when the Acts they pass are poorly written and badly thought out.

There is always the question of what risk we are addressing – in the modern corporatist political system, the PR risk to a government always takes priority over a real risk to citizens. Passing a law to protect the minister’s backside might make life more risky for others.

As helicopter parents, always hovering over our children and blaming teachers, schools, neighbours and other parents when something goes wrong, we’re creating a whole set of risks we don’t understand.

For politicians, managers and leaders their main responsibility is to manage risk, not pretend it’s been eliminated by the latest memo, law or silly schoolyard ban.

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Good critic, bad artist?

Are critics simply failed artists or do they have a more important role?

With the passing of art critic Robert Hughes I’m re-reading a passage of his autobiography, Things I Didn’t Know.

In Hughes’ passage describing his leaving Australia he talks of attempts at painting and makes an observation about art criticism that is true of every field.

“You do not have to be a good painter to be a good art critic,” he said. “But there is, to me, something a little suspect about an art critic who has never painted and who cannot claim to grasp even the rudiments of intelligent drawing.”

The same could be said of any critic – knowing the technicalities, skills, difficulties and effort enables a critic to make informed judgement. That isn’t to say they are superior at their trade than those they criticise.

It’s been said that we are all two bad decisions from ruining our lives or careers. That’s true in the artistic or professional fields – many managers, entrepreneurs, politicians, artists or just men going through middle aged crises have come unstuck from making the wrong choice at the wrong time.

It’s why we always have to view the stories of great success with caution, as the winners’ tales are tinged with survivor bias and for every winner there a field of skilled, hard working people who didn’t succeed.

In some fields, like arts and sport, the winners have to have skills before they will even get a chance of winning. Although there are many who could have be successful but weren’t because they never had an opportunity to pick up a paintbrush, guitar or ball at a key moment in their lives.

That isn’t quite so true in more subjective fields like business, politics or journalism. In those callings it is possible for a suburban apparatchik, dour accountant or talentless hack to rise because of their mentors, rat cunning or just pure dumb luck.

One of a critic’s roles is to call out those talentless but lucky hacks and in doing so they do society a great favour.

In a world where spin and PR often trump good policy or ethical behaviour, we have to pay attention to the informed critics who help us filter out the misinformation and lies that is part of our information diet.

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Verified Jerks

Anonymity is the problem on the Internet, accountability is.

When you work in customer service you quickly learn that some people are just rude jerks. Depending on how bad a day you have it could be 2, 5 or 10% of the population.

For these people the Internet has been a paradise with almost anonymous forums and newsgroups allowing them to be rude and obnoxious with little risk of being held accountable for their spiteful behaviour.

One of the hopes of social media services was that forcing people into using accounts tied to their real identities would impose some self discipline among these trolls and haters,

Sadly The argument that verified identities would stop people being irresponsible is wrong.

The sad story of seemingly mature people insulting and wanting to beat up a five year old participant on a reality TV show illustrates how manners, good taste and style are beyond some people.

It’s depressing, but unsurprising that this demographic can’t figure out that ‘reality’ TV shows are anything but real. The programs are carefully edited to suit the dramatic narrative of the producers with some of the participants being portrayed as villains and others as heroes.

The little girl in question could be in a spoilt little brat, but you’d want to be careful making that judgement from what you see on TV.

Many would put the spiteful behaviour of the Facebook commentors down to being another example of social media destroying our society, but this behaviour pre-dates the web.

In the 1990s we saw a similar wave of insults aimed at President Clinton’s then teenage daughter Chelsea. In many ways it was far worse in what we are seeing today in that those encouraging that behavior were the leaders of political parties and their ideological fellow travellers in the media.

The abuse of Chelsea Clinton marked the rapid decline of standards in politics that leaves many of us now sickened by the behaviour of all parties – and that of the media that treats their shenanigans seriously.

Notable about the raucous political partisanship is that most participant are happy, even proud, to be named as they debase the institutions they’ve been elected to represent.

The reason is they aren’t accountable, they know most of us are rusted on voters and the few that aren’t can be conned long enough by expensive advertising campaigns to get them elected.

Should they not get elected, they’ll be welcomed into the arms of their corporatist friends who will find them a nice sinecure on a board, committee or think tank.

The real reason people act like jerks is because they think they aren’t accountable – the politicians know they aren’t and most Facebook users figure the odds are in their favour that they’ll never be held to account for their boorish behaviour.

Anonymity is the reason for bad manners on the net, accountability is. While our society doesn’t make people accountable for cruel, rude or corrupt behaviour then these people will thrive. With or without the internet.

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Distribution is not the problem

If your business relies upon distribution problems, then you may be in trouble.

The web is too efficient at information distribution, which is the problem for newspapers whose business model was built out of the difficulty the working man and woman had in finding out what was happening in the world around them.

In today’s society, there’s no excuse for not knowing what is going on. If you only choose to keep up to date with what the Kardashians are wearing, the weight of Olympic swimmers or who won last night’s reality TV extravaganza then you only have yourself to blame.

The web’s efficiency means there’s no shortage of ‘stuff’ pouring into our lives – music writer Bob Lefetz puts it well when he says “Kids don’t have a short attention span, anybody who says that is completely ignorant. They’ve got an incredible shit detector”.

Distribution is not the challenge, that bit is insanely easy. It’s delivering quality and getting the message about our products heard above the Internet’s constant buzz.

As consumers, and more importantly as citizens, it’s up to us to filter that noise and not accept dross any more.

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