Detroit's Executive Jets

It seems many people were horrified that the kings of the car companies in Detroit chose to fly (separately) on their private jets to Washington to beg for Government (i.e. taxpayer) support for their ailing monoliths.

Personally I am flabbergasted. The businesses they run are hemorrhaging billions; workers are being laid off in the thousands and yet they still think a (reportedly) US$20,000 one way trip on a private jet (a first class fare on a commercial flight would apparently have cost $900 return) makes solid commercial sense.

As was pointed out to them, even if they couldn't stoop to join the rest of us on a commercial flight, they surely could have private jet pooled and shared the one plane.

It was also reported that the chief of Ford uses the same private jet to commute home each weekend from Detroit to Seattle and that he took home a staggering US$25 million in salary, benefits and incentives last year.

It is of course easy to dismiss this as 'Nero fiddling while Rome burns' behaviour. But it is more than that.

These guys clearly live in a different world than the rest of us. They are closeted and cocooned. How can they possibly understand or empathise with their customers when they live in a fundamentally different but parallel universe? They can't.

And this is one of the primary reasons their organisations are being brought to their knees. No business which is disconnected from its customers can thrive. It is no wonder they kept building gas guzzling V8s when the market was turning to small, frugal, low emission vehicles.

Without any actual customer empathy, all you can rely on is market research and, as I have explored elsewhere in this blog, that is often a flawed indication of real consumer sentiment.

I think it would actually be a good thing for the large car companies to fail because it would open up the market for new, innovative, customer-focused, entrepreneurial start-ups who would create transportation solutions of value for us. But failing that, the best way to turn around these dieing corporate monsters would be to put someone at the helm who lives in the same world his customers inhabit, and who is solely focused on finding solutions which add value to them.