Working Nine To One

Willie Walsh, CEO of BA, is a perennial target of mine but, in fairness, he makes that easy.

I have described BA as a strategically lost company before and there has never been a worse moment for what was once the 'World's Favourite Airline'. It is being squeezed by low budget airlines at one end who consistently out perform expectations in terms of profit and by higher service airlines at the other end who focus on their niche market and make enough to survive. BA's two major 'strategic' moves in the last year have been to make a series of reactionary, 'knee jerk' slashes of its costs, with no real impact or direction, and then make arguably its biggest blunder, to buy another airline in the same strategic 'no man's land', Iberian.

In all of this, the backbone of the company has stuck with Walsh until yesterday when the staff who man the airlines voted nine to one in favour of a strike action, to leave the course of action in the hands of the union, Unite. Walsh seemed to suicidally want to fight his staff, having asked them to make sacrifice after sacrifice to the point when they finally made their stand over the 'dumbing down' of their roles. The company now faces a 12 day period of strike action over one of the busiest travel times of the year - Christmas. It could not have been a worse result for BA - it could not have been a more stupid move by management.

The recent BA history is a litany of business cock ups. Terminal 5's opening was about as inspiring as it got as a superb terminal was project managed in a schoolboy fashion, stress testing the unprepared systems with hordes of real passengers. Then we had the series of staff cost cuts that played with the fantastic loyalty of the staff only to shaft them by trashing their worth in the latest move. In between were two attempts to buy a dying airline in Spain, the first ending in farce as BA's market worth fell below that of their target at the crucial moment, and the launch of a business class only airline out of the City Airport with a capacity of just 32 seats which pandered to the whims of rich bankers when two similar services to the US had failed less than a year earlier.

The message in that service alone could not have been worse to staff, the shareholders and the public - BA was prepared to service rich bankers ahead of paying its staff with a service already proven to be unprofitable by two other companies.

I don't know what the shareholders think of Walsh as they seem to support him grimly, but we now know what the stakeholders think. The once highly vaunted air crews of the once great airline have voted categorically to fight him - and you know instinctively that he has lost his best weapon to survive because he has undervalued and disrespected it.

It's not as if you could not see this coming. It has been a quick process of losing the confidence of the staff and laying a scene for the battle. Walsh calls the action of the union 'cynical' but that's what you get when you lose the support of your staff. From a union's point of view there is no point striking when the airline does not fly - their tactics are generally to hit you were it hurts most as it quickly sparks negotiation, at a battlefield very much with the terrain in their favour. There are no surprises that this is exactly what has happened and it was about as obvious as the cock up at Terminal 5 as it all unravelled.

BA seems to be managed by fools. The strike action is not at all helpful. We can see the Royal Mail happening all over again with the one tragic ingredient for Walsh - the customers do have a choice. There are other airlines to fly - in fact, to Walsh's edification, the skies and airports are full of them. His strategic plan has been a series of schoolboy responses to a business game exercise.

I would say that BA needs a rapid change at the top to survive.