SamPenny.com

Is the Qantas Brand in Trouble?

I fly about once a week on Qantas, domestic and international. I am a Gold Flyer which I guess is meant to have privileges and have spent some time trying to book a holiday through Qantas Holidays. Here's Qantas looks like from my eyes:

• Their planes are delayed about 50% of the time when I fly.
• I tried to book a flight using points and their website didn't work because it kept telling me that my 6mth old son's birthdate was invalid. I went over this thing about 10 times and still couldn't work it out.
• I then tried to phone and their voice activation system thought I had some strange accent. 1hr later, I was able to make a booking via a real person. Lucky I'm a Gold Freqent Flyer.
• I then tried to book a holiday via Qantas Holidays, probably my worst ever holiday booking experience ever. They have no website where you can book a hotel. Their prices are inflated probably about 25%. Their staff in the call centre are rude and unhelpful and they never get back to you even if they say they will.
• When booking a flight, they have a software called Infotriever which is meant to update Outlook with your flight details. Half the time it puts in a flight time which is out by about 10hrs. I wonder if I missed a flight because of their software problem, would they blame me?
• And then Qantas has its maintainance issues and union problems that really provide a terrible service to its customers. Too often we hear of panels falling off or planes having to turn around.
• The food service and quality has plummetted even further. It's the only thing you look forward to on a flight to break the monotony.
• The new Qantas Frequent Flyer program is terrible. Expensive. Awful. Impossible! It's about 240k points just to fly to London.
• And lastly, I seem to recall Qantas being voted the worst for customer service in the world. In the world!

Geoff Dixon has given the incoming CEO a big hospital pass. He has spent the past few years running down the core of Qantas for the sake of profits. Great that it has close to a $1bn profit in increasing fuel prices, greater expenses and a unionised workforce, but this is all at the expense of customer satisfaction. I am starting to get pretty sick and tired of their "efficiencies" at the sake of my comfort and satisfaction. It doesn't take much to please a customer, but Geoff Dixon was 100% focused on profit because he was leaving and a big payout was tied to the earnings he returned. I pity the new CEO. He will have a challenge of his hands trying to restore the loyalty that they used to have. Geoff has eroded this.

A money hungry corporate who has forgotten that his airline is not the only one in the sky.

Good to see the back of you Geoff.

Sports that we just don't care about - But for now...

It just dawned on me. The Olympics is all about those sports that we just don't care about except for every 4years. We don't care about Greco-Roman Wrestling, handball or Table Tennis. But we become addicted, glued and armchair experts.

We can't name the world champion team for waterpolo or the dominant force in synchronised swimming. But they get top billing and we eat it up!

We don't care about the tennis or basketball or the baseball because this is on TV all the time. We just don't care.

But also, we don't care that about the fact that someone from outside our country won the men's 10m pistol shoot.

We thrive for something unusual, peculiar and just weird. But most importantly, we thrive on someone realising their dream. We see the emotions and the love of the competition. We live our life through them, even though we will forget about them next week.

The Flywheel = FFE

For the past 3 years I have travelled to MIT in Boston to learn from the best business minds in the world. My #1 takeaway from this year was a concept called the Flywheel.

Imagine a huge flywheel, 20m in diameter and weighing close to 20tonnes. You push will all your might. Push, push, push. All your efforts and you only just nudge it. You push some more, it turns a little more. Push, push, push. It turns more and more. You seem to be making progress. Gathering speed, momentum, it because easier and finally. A breakthrough, the massive flywheel now seems so easy to push, its massive weight and its speed now combine to give it momentum that even an army couldn't stop.

Every business is similar to this flywheel. At the start, it almost seems impossible, but the greater the focus, the greater the faith that you are pushing for the right reason and knowing that you are pushing in the right direction, everything just seems to become easier. You business starts to gather momentum, customers flock to you and profits don't seem to be a struggle.

The Flywheel = Focus * Faith * Effort

Score your business. If you only have 50% focus, 50% faith and 50% effort, then your flywheel will only spin at 12.5%. 80% Focus, Faith and Effort you only get to 51.2%. If you have 96% FF&E, then you can spin your flywheel at 88.5% of its maximum. You can see the importance of alignment of everyone in the company, that they have faith in where you are steering the ship and the work they do day in day out in totally in support of where you want to be in 10yrs time.

It's amazing when you think of this, how something so simple can completely change the dynamics of the business. But use it elsewhere. There are a lot of applications for it.