BusinessWeek: How Delta Did Bankruptcy
by Dean Foust
BusinessWeek
Delta Air Lines (DAL) plunged into bankruptcy in September 2005, marking the culmination of more than a decade of management missteps made largely out of hubris. The Southeastern airline allowed itself to go through many of the stages of decline outlined in Jim Collins’ new book. Its sense of infallibility helped foster an undisciplined pursuit of practically every new jumbo jet that aircraft manufacturers rolled out, forcing it to fly large planes even on one-hour routes. Add to that a distinct denial of the increasingly grim realities of the airline business, exemplified by the errors made earlier this decade by then-Chief Executive Leo F. Mullin. He launched the trendy Song discount airline, which fizzled amid high costs and stiff competition from JetBlue Airways (JBLU). Worse, Mullin negotiated a 2001 labor deal that paid top pilots a record-shattering $300,000 a year. “Management always had to have the biggest and the best,” recalls a former exec. “It was the Delta way.”
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Southwest Airlines: “Put Your Employees First”
My favorite, and perhaps the most famous concept from Jim Collins‘ Good To Great is the Hedgehog Concept:
Are you a hedgehog or a fox? In his famous essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” Isaiah Berlin divided the world into hedgehogs and foxes, based upon an ancient Greek parable: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”
The gist of this parable is that the fox, with all of his cleverness, speed, and agility, has no tactical advantage over the dowdy hedgehog, whose “one big thing” is knowing how to curl up into a needlish ball when the craftier fox tries to eat him for lunch.The hedgehog’s advantage is that he knows his one big thing, and stays true to this innate gift rather than trying to outfox a fox.
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