Quote:
Originally Posted by Aage  Strikes me that this thread was begun as an acknowledgement (by the President of the company that makes the product we are all here to discuss) of the work they began some months ago, and it was NOT, in my book, another place where we could post more long diatribes about how we could do it better. If we want to continue this extraodinary conversation with the top management person at Airstream, then I firmly believe that it behooves us to stop heaping scorn on his efforts to acknowledge the difficulties, along with some of the action items he plans to take to reduce them.
Let's try to get along, let's try to keep this a non-adversarial interaction: you know that we will lose if we don't succeed in being helpful.
In his place, I would just drop the initiative and "hang up the phone" if all I got was vitriolic derision.
The time to list the problems is over. The company has identified their plans. Let's give them a chance to move on them.  |
In real life, I'm the administrator of a small city. I've seen "diatribes," "vitriol" and "derision." In my day, I've seen everything this side of torches and pitchforks. I only wish our occasional unhappy resident was as polite, constructive and patient as the members of the Airforums who have posted here.
It should not be "extraordinary" for customers to have a dialogue with top management. It should be routine. CEOs (or public officials) should not be insulated from customers or constituents. They should not be protected by the marketing department or the public relations department or 17 layers of bureaucracy. In my experience, the best CEOs are the one who understand the natural tendency for employees to "buffer" them from bad news. And they cut through the fog by going out and asking customers, "How are we doing"? They listen to the answers and they make changes.
If Airstream was sitting on top of the customer satisfaction ratings, Bob Wheeler could swing by for a victory lap. If they had decisively resolved the filiform corrosion problem, he could take a bow, shake a few hands and maybe sign a picture or two. The simple fact of the matter, however, is that Airstream faces the AMF-Harley Davidson problem. And it is no small irony that Airstream is looking for an answer HD found in the post AMF years:
"Rather than trying to match the Japanese, the new management deliberately exploited the "retro" appeal of the machines, building motorcycles that deliberately adopted the look and feel of their earlier machines and the subsequent customizations of owners of that era. Many components such as brakes, forks, shocks, carburetors, electrics and wheels were outsourced from foreign manufacturers and quality increased, technical improvements were made, and buyers slowly returned...." HD Wiki quote
I'm very good at what I do... but each and every day I learn something from our customers. It's not that they can do my job better than me, but they have information vital to our success. They know what they want. And no matter how good a job I think we're doing, the only thing that matters is how good of job
they think we're doing.
My tendency towards candor is not limited to Internet forums. I'm plain spoken in real life, far more than most expect from a petty bureaucrat. And I've heard the "Oh, my goodness, you just can't say that" to the Governor or the Senator or some other divine entity that walks not only on water, but on a light mist. I've seen my share of aides and minions blanch thinking a lightning bolt was about to strike... and yet, here I am.
One should speak truth to power. Good leaders appreciate thoughtful candor. Bad ones, well, they deserve to fail... which is quite often what happens when our society and markets are free.