The Descent of Air India (3 page)

It does not take a management guru to conclude that the weak and flawed recruitment-and-rewards model had caused the airline irreparable damage and would continue to do so unless drastic action was initiated by the people at the top.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

My initial months as the head of the Department of Public Relations at Air India were spent getting to know the many departments and the people who ran them. I met the heads of different departments, followed their work and understood the way an airline functioned. I had to keep myself abreast of all the developments in the organisation because I was new and my job entailed responding to media queries about the airline and keeping the chairman informed. There were several patterns that I discerned in the process of familiarising myself with the ways of Air India. One was that the people in the senior and mid-level management cadre were unwilling to resolve issues. They let problems lie unattended. As a result, problems flagged decades ago remained unaddressed. Let me cite an instance. The failure to attract first class passengers was pointed out by J. R. D. Tata in the 1980s when he was a board member as he had been removed from chairmanship a few years earlier. But the problem of poor loads in first class cotinues even three decades later. J. R. D. Tata had exhorted his employees, ‘I beseech you that when I am no more, and those of you who will still be there, always remember this, the airline must never, never be allowed to be anything else but the best. In doing so, we will not only ensure our own development, growth and progress but prosperity of our own people.’

Ideally, the airline ought to have set up a process whereby the changes that were necessary to ensure passenger loyalty were set in motion and followed through. The staff at various customer interface points should have been trained and guided towards becoming more customer-friendly. Instead, his words were destined only to be framed and put up on the office walls! J. R. D. Tata had also noted way back in 1972 that trade union office bearers showed hostility towards the management as proof of their devotion to members’interests. But again, his voice was not heeded. Belligerent and obstructionist leaders hijacked the running of the organisation and set up roadblocks in the way of Air India’s transition into a competitive era. Many of the deemed changes were simply too critical for the airline’s survival in view of the industry having transitioned from a semi-regulated environment where passengers chased seats to an intensely competitive era when seats were chasing passengers. Yet, the management team did little by way of reining in the unions or working out a way to transform the airline. Whenever the issue of Air India’s inability to counter its competitors came up, the management would throw up its hands and blame the unions. There was never any effort to introduce new work practices and systems that would enhance passenger loads in premium classes—all too critical for the airline to be profitable in a scenario where competition was crowding the airspace. In most cases, the management played the role of a meek bystander, while the union leaders took charge of the airline.

Over the years, successive chairmen and departmental heads gave up even the token protest that their predecessors would make against irrational demands by union leaders. Demands were either conceded the moment a union served a strike or a non-cooperation notice, or soon after it launched a go-slow and began delaying flights and grounding them. On some occasions, some chairmen and departmental heads did muster the courage to withstand the pressure, but they were either transferred and replaced by a more pliant person or reprimanded and forced to mend their ways. It was simpler to follow orders and complete one’s term in office than to upset the applecart by taking on the union or implementing requisite changes. While Air India managed to survive despite this for years, it was thrown off course when its days of monopoly came to an end. As the skies opened up, passengers began deserting Air India in droves.

The inability of the management to stand up to the unions has definitely cost the airline dearly, which was also incomprehensible to me as a new entrant who had been exposed to a tough and firm managerial approach while working in Coal India. I had seen M. S. Gujral, the then chairman of Coal India, stand up to the notorious coal mafia and belligerent unions at significant risk to his personal safety. In Air India, the senior management seemed to buckle far too easily. Consider, for instance, the identity change exercise. Apart from exposing the one-man rule in Air India, the initiative also brought into the open the enormous clout of the union leaders. In addition to the logo and livery changes, the menu on Air India’s first class was also upgraded at the time and it was decided that Johnnie Walker Blue Label whisky, which had just been launched, would be served to premium class passengers. Passengers, however, complained that they were not being served the whisky even though it was on the menu. The staff would tell them that it was out of stock. When we enquired into this, we found that the whisky meant for the passengers was being pilfered by the cabin crew. Instead of confronting the errant crew members and ensuring that the passengers got their due, the management decided to do away with the change altogether. It withdrew the whisky!

Not only was the management unwilling to face up to the unions, it was also composed of a deeply divided set of professionals. Air India had over a dozen departments in all, with five operational departments: Engineering, Operations, In-Flight Services, Commercial and Ground Handling. Each department was aware of the problems that a passenger faced, but never saw them as its own. It was as if things needed to be fixed, but not in their own backyard. The departmental heads, I discovered, were only too ready to pin the blame on their colleagues in the other departments. Officials were more than eager to point out the inefficiencies of the other departments, while maintaining a stoic silence about their own. Aircraft maintenance engineers, for instance, spoke about the absence of aggressive marketing, poor customer care and delays in baggage delivery; the commercial department officers were quick to point fingers at poor aircraft cabin ambience and upkeep, delay in providing aircraft for flights to depart on time, deteriorating standard of in-flight service and lack of grooming of the cabin crew; and the in-flight crew felt that engineers were not doing their bit to maintain seats, toilets, entertainment systems on aircraft and that the airport staff were not tuned in to passenger needs. The weaknesses of the Air India product were, therefore, not unknown. The problem was that no one owned up to his or her own shortcomings.

Employees across departments were, however, united in their belief that the media was being unfair to Air India by front-paging reports of flight delays, flight cancellations leading to inconvenience to passengers and of the staff’s rude behaviour, among others. They asked me to restrain the media and ensure that there was no negative reporting. The fact that India had a vibrant free press was ignored. I tried to point out that the profile Air India enjoyed was far bigger than that of most other companies. Hence, every action of Air India made news and the management should consider the media reports as an indicator of public opinion and address the weaknesses in our systems. The media was writing about Air India’s inefficiencies because it mattered to the people, especially to the elite, who were regular fliers of the airline.

I would often meet many of our fliers at several social functions in Mumbai. They would tell me about their pleasant experiences of the past and also the not-so-happy experiences of recent times. Some complained about delayed flights, others about lost baggage and almost everyone commented on the deteriorating attitude of the cabin crew and ground staff. What was, however, remarkable about that era was that the aggrieved passengers narrated their unpleasant experiences with a sense of anguish. These days, however, they do so with intense anger, reflecting the fall of Air India in their esteem.

TAKING THE INITIATIVE

Within a short period of time, I realised that one of the bigger challenges at Air India would be to reconcile my way of functioning with that of the organisation.

I could not bring myself to follow my colleagues in their decision to let personal interests take precedence over those of the airline. I could not bring myself to let the problems persist and remain a mute spectator. I was not ready to let fear get in the way of my work. Also, having switched jobs so often in the past, I was confident that I could move on to better prospects if the need arose. Unlike the rest in the organisation, there was, therefore, no compelling reason for me to be beholden to Air India.

Was this the best way to have dealt with the situation? Should I have toed the Air India line? I have asked myself this question several times over the past several years as I faced the ire of some of the chairmen and managing directors besides the unions. But the answer is never different:I could not have or would not have lived my life any other way.

That I did not wish to be a mute spectator was clear within a month of joining the organisation. As part of the airlines identity change programme, Hindustan Thompson Associates (HTA), the airline’s advertising agency for nearly six decades, was commissioned to create a multi-projector audio visual presentation that would be shown at all the corporate identity launch functions. HTA sent us a proposal for nearly
16 lakh. My experience of working on similar projects earlier told me that the quote was exceptionally high. I sought to renegotiate the terms and invited a competing bid. I also asked HTA to rethink the figure it had quoted. After some consternation, HTA halved the quote to
8 lakh. B. K. Mangaokar, the commercial director, told me that I should accept the revised quote and continue with the old agency. As a month-old employee, if I tried to bring in a new agency at a lower price, I would be pulled up if the project went off schedule or fell short on quality. His advice was truly useful, but it had become clear to me that the organisation did not curb initiative. If I could bring about a difference, despite being a newcomer to the system, so could those who had served the organisation for decades. At the end of the day, Air India was let down by its people, who let their personal priorities take precedence over the larger organisational interests.

It was not an impossible task to initiate change, because I managed it despite ruffling quite a few feathers within years of my joining the airline. Apart from negotiating hard on behalf of the airline, I was also eager to make the most of the emerging opportunities. I had noticed the needless expenditure being incurred by Air India on in-flight entertainment videos. Two one-hour long video magazines were being produced in London at a prohibitive cost. Adding to that was the additional burden of flying and hosting an Air India employee in London for 8 to 10 days every two months to oversee the video production. I suggested to the managing director, Subhash Gupte, that we should look at a less expensive alternative. Mr Gupte readily agreed. I met several Mumbai-based companies and finally zeroed in on Ronnie Screwvala, whose video production house then was much smaller than the huge empire that he subsequently built with UTV Group. He agreed to take on the project at one-fourth of the expenditure that was then being incurred without any difference in the quality of the programmes, since the video segments were being sourced from the same global companies.

A year later, while flying to Los Angeles by Lufthansa for my first international vacation, I saw advertisements being screened in their in-flight entertainment programmes. I was struck by the possibility of doing the same for Air India. On my return, when Marzban Patel of Mediascope Publicitas contacted me for an advertisement for an international newspaper that he represented in India, I broached the subject of his collecting advertisements for our video programmes as well. Mediascope was soon generating advertisement revenue worth
8–10 lakh per month.