COA Solutions - Business Accounting Software

One of the questions that always goes through my mind when I am on a plane waiting for take off is, ‘Am I safer because there is a pilot flying this machine or would I be safer without him?’.  This was brought home to me with the media discussion on the crash of the Air France Airbus 330.  There is one line of reasoning that the Airbus’ ‘fly-by-wire’ technology where the software on the plane takes the pilot’s intentions and makes the necessary adjustments to the plane’s air flaps.  Airbus claim that this is safer and leads to less maintenance.  Opponents say that the cruder Boeing approach is safer and prevents the aircraft doing ‘daft’ things.

At a visceral level the latter seems true. If we get into problems then its’s good to know there is a professional on board who will know what to do.  On the other hand sometimes it is the professionals in the cockpit who cause the problems in the first place.  This happened last year to the Boeing 737-500 Aeroflot-Nord plane flying into Perm in Siberia, where a heady mix of alcohol and inexperience led to the mis-reading of an indicator.  The result: 88 deaths.  Or the extraordinary mid air collision in Brazil between a Embraer Legacy 600 and a Boeing 737-800. Here the pilots of the executive jet, both trained to Captain level, switched off (though it was never proved that was deliberate)  the transponders that tell other planes where they are.  They were also told to fly at 36,000 feet, an instruction they simply ignored. The result: 155 deaths.

How does this relate to business.  When we look at the great business crashes of the last few years we see men (yes, it does always seem to be men!) such as Chuck Prince of Citibank, Fred Goodwin of Royal Bank of Scotland, Stan O’Neal of Merrill Lynch and Dick Fuld of Lehman Brothers.

When we read about these collapses we see very human mistakes, mistakes that go to the core of what it means to be human, the need to feed swollen egos, the way that our triumphs always seem extraordinarily great and very dependant on our actions and our disasters, in contrast very small and usually down to extraneous factors. There is a fatal fault at the heart of a lot of business thinking and I think that it can be summed up simply as ‘Just because we have the capacity for rational thought and behaviour doesn’t mean that we actually act that way’.

The indicators in their cockpits would have shown some worrying numbers.  There would have been, and in the case of RBS, we know there was serious doubts raised.  But the pilot will have over ridden these indicators, because he knows best.  He is uniquely placed to take the whole thing to its destination and the crew and the passengers are really just there for the ride.

What if these decisions were taken out of the hands of the executives and their ability to execute the take-over of another bank was damped down by the system, just like the Airbus ‘fly-by-wire’ approach.  What would we lose by this?  The pilot changes from being a dashing heroic figure to that of a train driver.  A valuable job, but one that carries a less impressive uniform and cap. The CEO changes from being the swash buckling entrepreneur and leader of men to, well,  I am not sure what.  Maybe the person who keeps an eye on things just to make sure that nothing is about to crash.  A person who ensures that the processes are working throughout the organisation. A person who spends time with the people in the front line finding out how the world looks to the people delivering the services and what customers actually think of those services. No longer the centre of puff pieces in the pink pages. Think of the paper, ink and journalist time saved.

Often when clients tell me they want to make better decisions, backed by business intelligence data, I often have a wry smile and think of the pilots.  Despite all the decision supporting software they have, making their lives and the lives of their passengers safer, you just know left to their own devices that they would just love to be flying by the seat of their pants.

It’s not just the pilots though, even when we are herded onto our budget air flight,  sitting cramped in our seat, consuming our mechanically recovered re-formed chicken meal, we still feel uplifted when the pilot comes on the intercom to tell us how the weather is in our destination.  There is a symbiotic relationship between how dangerous and risky the venture is, or appears to be, and how much we value the man in charge.  I was on a flight to Newquay in Cornwall, where after 2 aborted landings the pilot got a spontaneous round of applause from the people on board when he landed on the third attempt.  That must be good for his ego and his Serotonin levels.  Who would not be tempted to increase the feeling of danger, when the upside is so high. After all, when did the driver of the 52 to Willesden Green last get cheered.

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Tags: Business Intelligence, management

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 18th, 2009 at 10:48 am and is filed under Business Intelligence, Musings by Chris Sands. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.