Admirable Listening at U.S. Airways

Posted on December 29, 2007
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It’s a start. W. Douglas Parker, CEO of U.S. Airways, takes any and all questions from angry employes of the airline and gives transcripts of the questions and answers to the media upon request. As reported by The New York Times, the candid exchanges seem to be a dialogue rooted in expediency and mistrust, but they could be the beginning of mutual awareness and support. They are a commendable corporate communication technique.

Here’s a sample question provided by The Times: “‘Doug, I watched you on CNBC today,’ said one e-mail message from a worker, sent on Oct. 25. ‘And I hate to tell you but the interiors of our plans [sic] smell bad and they are filthy. As an employee I am embarrassed to admit working for US Airways. When are you going to quit talking and do something about it?’”

CEO Parker says the airline learns a lot about its actual performance from exchanges like these and that service will be getting better. U.S. Airways merged with America West Airlines in 2005 and tried unsuccessfully to merge with Delta Airlines last year.

Rising fuel costs are a factor in the financial pressures on airlines. But management insensitivity to how cost-cutting is actually affecting passengers and employees could be impeding any intention to make things better. That’s why Doug Parker’s attentiveness to his employees’ feedback is so admirable. Somewhere among the bitterness there’s likely a way to move forward together. Progress in a situation like this starts with listening, with encouraging candor and realizing the depth of concerns.

As a CEO’s attentiveness becomes known around the routes, respect if not high regard, is likely to grow. And passengers may be better served, if only marginally at the start. There could be expedients or solutions that management and the staff have overlooked, or didn’t think possible before sharing them with each other.

Certainly, one hopes for progress on the snack food front. The Times’ story reports that a U.S. Airways employee questioned “Why can we not get better quality snack items for our coach customers? One customer recently compared the generic pretzel nubs we serve to the fish food you buy in a .25 gumball machine at any zoo or park.”

“We’ve worked with our purchasing team,” management responded, “to bring in many companies to compete on our main cabin tidbit item (pretzels). To date, no one has been able to match our current cost, about 3 cents per package.”

Possibly the urgency of the airline’s situation comes through in such exchanges – enough so to prompt employees to consider how more defensible cost-savings, or changes in working procedures, might contribute to serving passengers and rebuilding the airline’s standing. It all begins with a willingness to listen and respond, and for that Doug Parker deserves credit. Any corporate executive would.

Feckless at the Greenspan Fed

Posted on December 18, 2007
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Cheers to the New York Times for examining the role of the Federal Reserve – a massive, shrug – as the abuses of subprime mortgage lending continued to build into what has become an economic crisis.

Former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan didn’t so much as deliver an “irrational exuberance” speech on subprime lending. It’s one thing to argue, as the Bush Administration always has, that the federal government is too big and ineffective. The remedy for that, however, is vigilance and a focus on policies – like subprime lending – that any competent regulator could understand have likely abuses.

“Financial innovation is great,” the Times quotes Sheila C. Bair, chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., “but you have to have some basic rules. One of the most basic rules is that a homeowner should have the ability to repay.”

How elusive is a precept like that?

The Times notes that Edward M. Gramlich, a Federal Reserve governor who died in September, “warned nearly seven years ago that a fast-growing new breed of lenders was luring many people into risky mortages they could not afford,” and privately urged Fed examiners to investigate affiliated with national banks. But “he was rebuffed by (then-Chairman) Alan Greenspan.”

Greenspan wrote in his recent memoir, The Age of Turbulence, that he was aware that loosening mortgage credit terms for subprime borrowers increased their risk, “But I believed then, as now, that the benefits of broadened home ownership are worth the risk.”

Ownership in which the eagerness of people to own homes makes them gullible and subject to banking practices that drain their budgets and make them unable to keep those homes? Please.

Government can work, does work, in fact, when it has a clear mandate and takes it seriously. Such as: Protect those who, because of the complexities of high-flying business practices, can’t protect themselves. It’s that simple. Ethics are applicable. Yet it takes leadership to show the way. Wouldn’t you expect that from the Federal Reserve Bank? If not the Fed, who?

A Blithe Nuclear Power Spokeswoman

Posted on December 5, 2007
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A spokeswoman for Exelon Nuclear replied with a non-sequitor to an observation by a former employee at Exelon’s Peachbottom, Pa., nuclear power station that working 12-hour shifts is a grueling experience.

“Your body is not designed to work 12 hours a day,” said Robert Hall, identified as a “former plant operator” in a York Daily Record story, “The schedule is brutal. It’s a killer.”

Bernadette Lauer, an Exelon spokeswoman, responded that in June, 2005, security guards at the plant overwhelmingly elected to work 12-hour shifts.

So what. Is a nuclear power plant run by employee votes? There’s been a historic trend to reduced working hours in part, at least, because eight hours are friendlier to workers and family routines than longer work shifts. If security guards signed on to management’s preference for eliminating a workshift, for whatever reasons, that does not absolve management of determining what’s best in terms of employee attentiveness and running the plant accordingly.

Exelon recently fired Wackenhut, its former security contractor, when the Nuclear Regulatory Commission confirmed wholesale lapses in guard attentiveness at Peach Bottom. Exhausting hours was the guards’ prime complaint.

Management needs to understand its role – it’s not only to run a nuclear power plant efficiently and profitably, but to do so in a manner that respects the capacities of its employees and promotes their most effective contributions. And, in nuclear power settings, “management” refers both to utility companies and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

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