A vivid display of “Innovation-NOT” made the headlines in USA Today this week. "Northwest's Flight Cancellations Surge" the headline proclaimed. The story began: “Northwest Airlines has cancelled more than 850 flights this past week, mostly because of crew shortages that management blames on disrupted work schedules from past bad weather (emphasis added). The pilots union blames it on 'bad planning' by management."
The article goes on to say that “using Flight Stats estimate of 125 passengers per plane, more than 100,000 travelers had their Northwest flights cancelled in the past week..."
The media covers in detail the finger pointing by the pilots’ union and management: failure to staff adequately (pilots), weather (management), abuse of sick calls (management), and so on. In the entire discussion there is not one statement by either party as to the worry and inconvenience, not to mention cost, that they are causing the customer, the people who make it possible for any of them to have a job at all.
What’s going on here? What’s going on is that Northwest’s top management is failing to show any hint of innovation. Certainly the company is in a tough situation. They have been through a wrenching bankruptcy (the airline emerged from Chapter 11 last month). Operating cost is understandably management’s focus. The pilots on the other hand agreed to pay cuts and other changes that are saving the company $608 million per year. They are focused on their pain. Neither focus has anything to do with customer satisfaction.
Management is not a one-dimensional task. Healthy financial status is clearly essential to the business, but it is only a necessity, it is by no means sufficient. Limited resources especially in terms of money and people are a challenge for every business, but for a service business like Northwest it’s more than a challenge...it’s life or death. Without innovation in handling people resources Northwest will die an even more painful death than if they had not solved the money problem.
As I put it in The Eye for Innovation, "innovation is problem solving." For Northwest management the problem to be solved is serving customers well. “Weather” is just one of many constraints in doing so. It is not an excuse. Disgruntled (or “sick”) pilots are also not an excuse. The airline says that it is “proactively canceling flights well in advance to allow adequate time to rebook.” That’s innovation? Incredible. It will be interesting to see how this story unfolds. It’s title can be “An Innovation-Not Story.”
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Technorati Tags: Innovation, Airline, Northwest Airlines, Airline Industry, Customer Service, Travel
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