The Wrong Stuff

"The slide into bankruptcy protection of two of the USA’s largest airlines is more a result of the carriers’ bad assumptions and slowness to act than the recent rise in fuel prices or the devastating terror attacks four years ago."  USAToday 9/15/05 page B1.

Woe are many of the airline companies.  They’ve been challenged to find a new, profitable business model.  And instead they’ve blamed their employees (too expensive), their customers (disloyal and cheap) and commodity traders (rising fuel prices) for their failures.  The leadership of these companies has done everything it can to continue Defending and Extending their broken Success Formula.  But not even post 9/11 federal government bailouts were enough.

When companies don’t step up to their market challenges by disrupting their operations and finding new solutions then their future is easy to predict.  Too bad for America that nearly half of the industry capacity is now in bankruptcy (and thousands of jobs at risk, not to mention the strain on the federal government’s Pension Benefit Guarantee system) simply because management would not stop trying to do more of what it had been doing (more, better, faster, cheaper) – an impossible plan for saving these companies.

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