Originally Posted by
orbitmic
As for the pilots' strike, brunos's take is that AdJ wanted to stand up to them and that the socialist government "twisted his arm". I personally think that the socialist government "a bon dos" and that AdJ just gave in at the end.
So if he gave in that means that his original intention was to go ahead and confront the pilots. Which is about the same as what Brunos and I are saying: he didn't shy away from confronting them, but didn't see it through. I gave him credit for being ready to confront them - which is much more than any of his predecessors did - but then in the vein of "not enough good/not good enough" subtracted some credit precisely because he backed down (shamelessly quoting my initial post):
Originally Posted by
San Gottardo
(...) he didn't shy away from confronting AF labour. (...)
I would criticize AdJ for not having done more of the right things and for having succombed to pressure from labour and other stakeholders. (...), less powerful unions - that would have made a mediocre CEO-ship a good, albeit not very good or even stellar, one.
Originally Posted by
orbitmic
In my view, which I know you do not share, because he was doing the wrong thing. In my view, instead of turning AF's core business around, he embarked in a series of mistaken endeavours like:
- Transavia which I think is a disaster waiting to happen and should either have been sold or kept as a "pure" investment with no operational involvement, ie AF having no say whatsoever in what they would do and letting them behave like an autonomous low cost carrier developing their own strategy, including competing against AF if they wanted to,
On Transavia, not sure whether we actually disagree. You say that contrary to me you think that it's a bad idea because it has AF involvement. I said that the initial idea of having an LCC in the group is the right one but that the way it is being interpreted and executed makes this a bad idea - for me another case of "right direction, but not far enough to have the positive impact.".
Again shamelessly quoting my own post:
Originally Posted by
San Gottardo
(...)he kicked off some good initiatives like Transavia (the details and execution of which turn a good idea in a bad idea though)(...)
So, whilst I criticised his predecessor PHG for doing the wrong things, I would criticize AdJ for not having done more of the right things and for having succombed to pressure from labour and other stakeholders. (...) an LCC that is free to develop without the constraints of some bad deal with AF pilots (...) - that would have made a mediocre CEO-ship a good, albeit not very good or even stellar, one.
Unless of course you think that AFKL should not have an LCC as part of its strategy, in which case we really disagree.
- Hop! which I think should have been sold and left alone or again treated as a mere investment too.
Yep. Again, I think he went in the right direction by separating the regional traffic from the mainline, and it was the right thing to move towards more operational integration of the three entities. But again, he should have gone further and faster. I also think that his idea for HOP was "we give it another chance as a repositioned entity, otherwise we'll (try) to sell it". I also do believe that his hands were tied to some extent.
In my view, AF should have fired people, closed routes, probably become quite significantly smaller at least temporarily, and focused on being a profitable long haul airline with just the feeding traffic needed to achieve that goal and only keeping the domestic routes and European non-connecting routes that can be profitable on a predominantly O/D basis. AF have not done that.
They have. But just not enough of that, and not fast enough, and not radically enough. And on top of that they flip-flopped on the Plan A/Plan B scenarios. So again: right direction, but not enough far enough, not fast enough, not consistently enough.
In summary, I maintain that he went in the right direction but did not do enough of it, was not consistent, was too slow, was not radical enough. Which in parts may be his personal inability, in parts may be because his hands were tied. I think him leaving frustrated is an indicator that lack of room for manoeuvre was a real problem and that he himself would have liked to go further.
We surely agree that AFKL is not over the hump yet, not by far. We agree that AdJ was not a great CEO. Maybe we also agree that relatively he was the best CEO they had in a long time (although admittedly the bar isn't very high on that). But just imagine a scenario where he would have had his way: productivity would be even higher, AFKL as a whole and AF in particular a leaner company, the LCC would have developed freely. On all these points he didn't get his way (and when you have a hoard of savages lynching managers that does leave an impression). TO be truly great he of course would have needed to be much more radical. For instance move the holding to the Netherlands. But then maybe even Hollande would have turned up at CDG to rip of AdJ's shirt.