The core of Taosim is about balance. I’m not certain of that, but it certainly sounds important and authoritative.
Richard Aboulafia is also important, and depending on the day of the week, he’s even an authority too. When he sent out his December 08 newsletter he touched on one of the most important Yin and Yang elements of aviation evolution and history.
The ROMANTICS vs. The ANALYSTS
While he castigated Vern for the Eclipse debacle and the herd of drunken followers, he was quick to point out how important this seemingly dysfunctional animal is. Were it not for the string of failures that romantics generate (for the occasional victory, like the Learjet, the 747, etc.) there would be little risk taking and innovation in aviation. In other words, the crushing blow to private aviation, air taxi, micro jets, etc. is all part of the larger evolutionary picture.
Popularity: 30%
We all hate hangovers. There is nothing pleasant about waking up from bad dreamless sleep to the intense regret that you begin to associate with sobriety.
But, in general and private aviation, metaphorically, we like TO DRINK. And we do it A LOT.
And that’s ok, so long as the booze keeps flowing, but the spigot is being shut off and lots of people aren’t as pretty as they once were. That little air taxi co.? Yeah, … not so cute in daylight. The manufacturer? Let’s not discuss the unspeakable acts they performed to get customers.
Dayjet’s recent collapse and Eclipse’s soon to follow path highlights just how far hubris and delusion can take you, your investor’s money and others into that big crater when you go on a bender.
Our cute little industry suffers from truly catastrophic failures. Richard pontificates on these tragedies years before they happen, which leads us to write posts like “The Joy of Being Right but Ignored.”
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Popularity: 34%
As autumn fades and the first flurries have begun to descend on New England, I’ve taken time to reflect on the behavior of honey bees.
Since early spring they have been racing around my yard, buzzing from flower to flower in an orgiastic frenzy of pollination. In fact, they would regularly glut themselves to drunkenness. It was as if they had no idea that fall would come, flowers would shrivel and die, and that nothing would remain to sustain them through the coming winter.
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I spent a good chunk of the weekend trying to decipher “short cuts” of marketing. I wondered about Facebook and Twitter and a lot of sites that consume a lot of time, but have questionable value in building the critical mass of awareness that marketeers seek.
Saturated with buzzwords that remind us how unhip we really are, many in aviation stumble along, grasping at new ideas looking for the short cut. You know… the one that is “hot” right now amongst the bleeding edge of the New York marketing geniuses. But then I thought, isn’t this the same culture that is responsible for Credit Default Swaps, Hedge Funds and other strange hollow promises? So why do people always look to the marketing savants of 5th Ave for answers they already know?
Popularity: 26%
Whether you believe it or not, the price of your service or product is one of the last things a customer considers.
Any price is fair, so long as value is there.
When the guy jumps into the convertible for a test drive, at what point does he start to get hung up on price? (Usually after he’s decided he has to have it.) Or better yet, ever noticed someone in Home Depot refuse to touch the latest drill until he knows the exact price? Nope… never.
Price comes into the equation at the end of the process, after inspection and desire have played their part, when it comes time to fine tune and make an assessment on the value of the item versus its price tag. Everyone wants the best, it’s just a matter of justifying how valuable it is to them versus what they can actually afford.
Popularity: 28%
While writing stuff about aviation is fun, I’ve noticed that a lot of my babble is critical, or has some negative twist to it. But since we live in an industry that runs so high on passion, dreams and people that actually like what they do for a living, writing about it is fun - even for a crabby critic.
But critics have a role, and most recently, when reading one of my wife’s sociology papers, it dawned on me: Society (and by extension aviation) suffers from a substantial dichotomy between what we say (and do) privately vs. what we say and do publicly. That is how projects like Dayjet and Eclipse go so far off the rails, so quickly, and with so much money.
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Long ago, in a lifetime far away, I was a chemist. Those who have read my postings in the past will recall that my father was an immigrant factory owner who eventually taught me the trade. Working in plastics, I apprenticed under my dad and by the time he sold the business and went into retirement I had become the laboratory manager and head chemist.
Enter the new guy: young salesman-turned-owner, enthusiastic but inexperienced. This was his first company and he had no industry background.
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Nothing makes one as smug as seeing news that you were right.
One of the benefits of aging is gaining that increased confidence of being able to smell trouble, point it out and know you’re right. When you make the right decisions, you get to avoid all the pain, headache and cost of those grander blunders you might have made in the past.
While mistakes cost us a lot, the key is surviving and learning from them. This is what makes the subject of Sentient facing liquidity problems so interesting. How could you be slow paying your vendors when you’ve already collected the money up front?
Popularity: 31%
The world of private aviation marketing savants may not be accustomed to reaching into the well of 1980’s cult television, but . . . . sometimes we must. Not only that, smart people who study strategy and management have shown that Faceman, Hannibal, B.A. and Murdock have something larger than themselves to share with us.
If the management of any company were to define risk as the integration of different business units and how well they perform together, the A-Team is one of the best examples of the typical integration of those units. To use the “your business as an engine” analogy…. any contemporary engine, be it a diesel or turbine engine, has a lot of moving parts. As long as they all do their job (to the tolerances the engineer specified) then the goal of power output is achieved. The failure or degradation of one part, however, especially at 4,000 or 40,000 RPM, can lead to disaster or in a best case scenario, tremendous inefficiency.
That is what makes the A-Team such an interesting case study: Knowingly putting themselves into high risk (a/k/a 40,000 RPM situations) time and again, they always come out unscathed in their wonderfully scripted cartoon explosion and action fueled episodes. In fact the recipe for their rising action, confrontation and solution is also classically defined and continued. (There are websites that allow you to build your own episode.) A local tech pundit even quipped, “The casting for the show was seemingly done out of some MIT Sloan School of Management playbook.”
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It always amuses me when I approach new clients and am told, “Our marketing strategy is great, we don’t need you”. I always have to bite my tongue and come up short of saying, “Yeah, well prove it”.
It is a tired cliche, but still a truism: The proof is in the pudding. Any restaurant owner will tell you their pudding is the best, but if they never see it leave the kitchen and never chat with the customers, how do they know?
All too often folks assume that because they have a marketing strategy or have hired someone to do it for them they are covered, the job is done. However, without any form of tracking you never really know.
Popularity: 26%