Springsteen on staying the course: More on The Daily Show Interview
23 March 2009
For a compelling statement about alignment, listen to the end of Springsteen's interview with Jon Stewart. As businesses struggle to articulate or sustain their purpose, Springsteen's words reverberate in the commercial world.
After joking about audience boos - could they ever sound like "Bruce"? - Springsteen explains his principled approach to performance: "I go out and play out to many audiences at night. There’s an audience that comes because they want to hear their favourite songs. There’s an audience that comes because they’re interested in the philosophy and the ideas of what you’re doing. There’s many different audiences. And I take it into consideration when I go out there, but I don’t let it define what I do, how we do it, or what we’re trying to do on any given night."
That “taking into consideration” without surrendering alignment to a purpose that endures is also the balancing act of great business leaders. Take Herb Kelleher, founder of Southwest Airlines in the US. The aim of the airline has always been to democratize the skies. The key to low cost flying, in the Southwest Airlines model, is to maintain very short turn-around times. That means ground crews have to be very quick servicing a plane between flights. The flight crew, including pilots, must be able to operate (on) any plane in the fleet, so that staff rosters never impose unnecessary trips by off-duty crew flying as passengers. To meet the goal, operations had to be very streamlined.
So what happened when Kelleher got the data showing that his passengers would prefer the cabins of a new kind of plane? Did he add the new models to his fleet, to delight his frequent flyers? No. He couldn’t. New kinds of aircraft would increase the complexities of the shuttle services Southwest runs. Ground and flight crews would have to train on another aircraft. Turnaround times between flights would probably lengthen. If they did, schedules would suffer. Reduced schedules means reduced load factors, which eats into margin. To protect margins, there would pressure to raise fares. But higher fares wouldn’t help Southwest democratize the skies, and they could do the opposite. To Kelleher, no possible benefits could justify the costs -- to the governing sense of purpose -- of changing the fleet. No new aircraft models were introduced. Like Springsteen says: I don’t let it define what I do, how we do it, or what we’re trying to do.