Author: Chet

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Dismal science of airline travel

Airlines are not a public service, unless you fly a lot on C-17s and C-130s. Like many of the rest of us, they’re in the game to make money or at least not to lose so much that the stock price tanks and the CEO gets fired.

With that in mind, here’s an excerpt from a piece the New York Times ran week before last on the economics of business class travel:

Travelers in business and first class may represent 10 to 15 percent of long-haul seats globally, but they account for up to half of the revenue of airlines like Lufthansa or British Airways, says Samuel Engel, a vice president at ICF SH&E, an aviation consulting firm. … But there is only so much space inside a plane. As the more lucrative seats expand, the coach section often contracts, with more seats jammed into the same cabin space and more discomfort for coach passengers.

You should be able to read the handwriting on this bulkhead. I made my prediction a while back in “Newly merged airline ends coach service“, and we may get there sooner than I thought. If the economics swing just a little bit, coach will become a loss leader, sort of, and the bean counters will start pushing to end it:

Generally speaking, a first-class seat takes up the space of six to eight coach seats and a business-class seat takes up about four coach seats. The same is roughly true for ticket prices: first class is generally more than twice the price of business; business class is usually four times the price of coach.

As a bonus, they can get rid of all those pesky, whining, bargain-obsessed coach passengers.

Can you make money off coach? I don’t know. Maybe relaunch Sir Freddie Laker’s original Skytrain concept with used widebodies in an all-coach configuration flying only major city pairs? The rest of the country can go Greyhound. Once the majors exit the coach business, they won’t be as motivated to sabotage a discount start-up as they were back during the 1970s. May even be glad to have someone take it off their hands.

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Here’s a tip for you

As I was signing the credit card slip last week, I mentioned to the dentist that he was missing out on a sure source of revenue to the tune of about 18%.

“How? That would double my profit margin.”

“Above the signature, add a line for a tip.”

Ah, the simple solutions are often the best.  We had a polite, if maybe just a little strained, chuckle.

Tipping has always struck me as a bad way to run a business because it doesn’t reinforce the virtues that Boyd associated with superior performance in organizations. As you might recall from Certain to Win, for example, these included his EBFAS climate and his “Theme for Vitality and Growth,” IOHAI.  In particular, it doesn’t seem to do much to promote teamwork, such as wait staff pitching in to help out when one waiter became overloaded, or taking the initiative to solve non-wait-related problems in the restaurant (like tidying up common areas or making suggestions for improvement — kaizen).

Plus, it reinforces a caste system, with some staff on straight hourly wage, some on salary, and one particular group on sub-minimum wage plus tips. Not good for Einheit.

But then, the restaurant business isn’t one I know much about; I don’t have any Fingerspitzengefühl for it.

Turns out, though, that I may be right. Check out restaurateur Jay Porter’s article, “After I banned tipping at my restaurant, the service got better and we made more money.”

Note the conclusion, which might come straight out of Boyd:

By removing tipping from the Linkery, we aligned ourselves with every other business model in America. Servers and management could work together toward one goal: giving all of our guests the best possible experience. When we did it well, we all made more money. As you can imagine, it was easy for us to find people who wanted to work in this environment, with clear goals and rewards for succeeding as a team.

One you have everybody together as a team, you can start investing in people and really get the benefit from Boyd’s climate. You may even be able to evolve an implementation of the principles that underlie maneuver warfare and the Toyota Production System/lean production. History suggests that if you do, you’ll wipe the table with the competition (a little pun, sorry).

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Incestuous delusion

It’s coming up on 30 years since Chuck Spinney and the group working with Boyd coined the term “incestuous amplification.” You can Google it to see how it has entered the mainstream.

Some of the definitions roughly equate it to “groupthink” or to situations where people limit their associations to those who agree with them.  But the underlying idea can manifest itself in many other ways, none of them beneficial to an organization’s ability to thrive and grow or even to survive.

Chuck’s definition is:  “It occurs when the preconceptions in the decider’s Orientation (which is his/her repository of ideology, belief systems, cultural heritage, previous experiences, education, genetic heritage, etc) misshape the Observations feeding that Orientation.”  As he notes: “Once IA is set into motion and is left uncorrected, it always tears any decision cycle to pieces from within. Boyd showed why there are very fundamental epistemological reasons for this unfolding evolution.” For more detail, see Chuck’s essay “Incestuous amplification and the madness of King George.” Continue reading →

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Nifty snowmobile

A “snowmobile” is Boyd’s metaphor for creating a solution to a problem, particularly when competitors or opponents — and, therefore, time — enter the picture. The ability to build and employ snowmobiles in the heat of conflict so intrigued Boyd that he made it the heart of his strategy:

A winner is someone — individual or group — who can build snowmobiles, and employ them in an appropriate fashion, when facing uncertainty and unpredictable change. (Revelation)

Here’s a neat new example:  “Not a car or bicycle, but a blend — an ELF vehicle.”

Organic Transit CEO Rob Cotter took technology from aircrafts, boats and bicycles and incorporated them into a “green” 130-pound vehicle.

In Boyd’s framework, a “snowmobile” could be a piece of hardware but more likely it’s a concept or idea for achieving your objective, usually in the face of determined opposition. Even if it is hardware, you have to have an accompanying concept for employing it. Musing on how to do all this eventually led Boyd to his Conceptual Spiral, where snowmobiles become not just hardware or even concepts but underlying virtues like insight, imagination, and initiative. [Conceptual Spiral and the Revelation are available from our Articles page.]

A tip of the hat to Mitch Musgrove out in the San Francisco Bay area for sending me this link!

 

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Interlude: More Southern ambience

MSC IlonaWe had guests in a couple of weeks ago, and one of the things we often do is drag them off to Savannah for strolling and libations. While we were there, the MSC Ilona sailed majestically up the Savannah River, providing the afternoon’s entertainment for the tourists on River Street.  As always, click for a larger view.

The Port of Savannah is the country’s fourth busiest container port and fastest growing over all.  In the FY ending June 30, the port moved right at 3 million containers (imports and exports) and should comfortably exceed that figure in 2014. The port is beginning a deepening and expansion program to be able to accommodate the larger ships that will be coming through the expanded Panama Canal.

Although we don’t have an IKEA store within a 4-hour drive, we do have a giant, 789,000 sq-ft IKEA distribution center that handles 15,000 containers through the Port every year. The store recently installed a 182,300-square-foot solar array producing approximately 1,973,562 kWh of electricity annually. Virtually all the furniture in our house came from you-know-who.

Georgia TheatreAnd then last Saturday, I went up to Athens to celebrate my brother’s retirement, after teaching for 31 years at Georgia State.  We did what everybody does in Athens, we hung out.  It has to be one of the greatest towns on the planet for that purpose. I went to Ole Miss and so am partial to Oxford, but it’s just too small to compete with Athens and its incredible band scene. In keeping with the spirit of the two schools, we go in more for culture — Faulkner and that sort of thing.

Here’s the Georgia Theatre last Saturday night, featuring the Bobby Compton band. You can see his bus on the left side of the picture.

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A couple of delicious articles on Microsoft

First off, I’m  not a Microsoft basher: We have a Windows 7 PC (Dell) that we use for accounting and database work. It was inexpensive and works great more than three years after we bought it.

And I looked at the Surface before buying a Kindle Fire HD 7. Nice little machine, but much too expensive for what I use a tablet for. I didn’t buy an iPad mini, either, for much the same reason. At this point, I should confess that my wife and I own three Macs, an iPad, and two iPhones, and if I can nurse my nearly 5 year old MacBook, which I’m using to write this, until the fall or early 2014, I’ll most likely buy a MacBook Pro.

With that off my chest, there were a couple of great articles this week on the Fall of the House of Microsoft. Continue reading →

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More box technology

I’m still fascinated by these things.

brooksHere are a couple from recent shoe purchases. They are similar but not identical, which suggests that somebody is working on the design.

It’s amazing that they fabricate these boxes, apparently by the hundreds of thousands, out of cardboard no less, and with such precision that they don’t need glue, tape, or staples to stay together during shipping, at the store, or on the way home. and all for what must be negligible cost.

sauconyThe Saucony pair, by the way, represents my first foray into “zero drop” shoes. Actually they have 4mm, compared to the 10-12 on my regular shoes. I’ve been running for about 40 years, so it’s with some trepidation that I’m trying them, but they do seem to be all the rage.

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Temporary insanity

Not long ago, I received an offer to become a “temporary, part-time” faculty member at a local institution. The letter went straight to the shredder, but the thing I remember most was the section that emphasized what I was not entitled to:

  • Health care
  • Any other benefits
  • Physical space at the university
  • Tenure or progress towards tenure in any form
  • Membership in any faculty organization
  • Right to call myself “adjunct”

Other than that, welcome to the team. Continue reading →

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New Edition of the Origins of Boyd’s Discourse

OriginsOfJohnBoydsDiscourseFigureJPEGWhat better way to celebrate US Independence Day, or a slightly belated Canada Day, than with a new edition of “The Origins of Boyd’s Discourse”? Click for a larger view, and a full-sized PDF is now on the Articles page.

Lots of changes, but the basic idea remains the same: To illustrate Boyd’s “many-sided, implicit cross referencing process” at work. As he wrote in his “Abstract”:

As a result, the process not only creates the Discourse but it also represents the key to evolve the tactics, strategies, goals, unifying themes, etc., that permit us to actively shape and adapt to the unfolding world we are a part of, live in, and feed upon.

Some of the changes are:

  • Explicit incorporation of “Destruction and Creation”and Conceptual Spiral
  • Highlighting the theory of evolution by natural selection, which Boyd cites on Patterns 11 as one of the two fundamental sources of his theory of conflict
  • More thematic treatment of the ideas in Patterns of Conflict, rather than just stating their names
  • Edits, rearrangements, formatting, and other kaizen

[If you’re really into the theory of conflict, or just appreciate incredible scenery and intense competition by some of the world’s greatest athletes, the Tour de France is being covered live on the NBCSports cable channel and on various web sites.]