Delta to Begin Paying Flights Attendants During Boarding

This explains so much. I always wondered why flight attendants and gate agents behave the way they do when customers need help around time constraints. Behavior that is often unhelpful and inhospitable. Seems like their organizations haven't really understood, or cared to invest, the resources needed for their employees to deliver consistently remarkable guest experiences.

If they did, maybe they'd have a chance to reap the kind of market share premiums and loyalty that Apple or HBO enjoy. But who we are fooling? Commercial airlines are simply trading in a commodity and the "customer service" function is just a cost of doing business for them...it's not THE business.

But what about hotels? We are not heavily regulated and our safety considerations don't come with as much gravity as air travel. What kind of market share premium could we drive for our brands if we designed the operations around delighting and winning over the consumer instead of engineering SOP's to backfill our P&L goals?

Alas, most of the current brands don't own the operating businesses of the hotels, which means they're not directly responsible for (or have much influence over) the workforce that delivers the experience to the guest. This is a classic case study in designing effective workplace incentives (or disincentives) that all business schools teach.

I smell an opportunity.

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As a family business, we have been straddling generational and ideological divides. Our challenge now is to better understand the broader impact of our choices, and rethink how we do our work. This will be a lifelong journey in examining our past choices and undoing what has been problematically at odds with the way we want to coexist with the world around us.