Volume 98: Imploding in real-time.

1. JetBlue: Imploding in real-time.

tl;dr: Up close and personal with the worst airline in America.

When I wrote a few weeks ago about Spirit merging with Frontier, I expressed surprise at seeing JetBlue atop the “worst airlines in the country list” because I quite liked them.

Having now traveled with JetBlue for the first time in a while, I have to say that JetBlue isn’t just the worst airline in the country; it’s suffering from what can only be described as a corporate implosion. I can’t imagine how bad it must be to work there.

Let’s walk through a snapshot of our recent vacation experience: a flight booked months earlier canceled without explanation 9 hrs before takeoff, a last-minute 10X more expensive ticket on another airline just to make our connecting flights, an accumulative 6+ hours on hold with customer service that never came to a resolution, flying into an airport 2,000 miles away at 11pm with no idea if we’d have a seat for a connecting red-eye until we got there, getting seats only to be informed on the plane that, by law, our 14yr old son can’t sit in the exit row seat they’d allocated, then being accused of lying about his age (we hadn’t), and then the piece-de-resistance, being threatened with de-planing unless he agreed to sit in a middle row seat at the other end of the plane between two strangers. What a complete and utter shit-show.

So, what’s going on? Well, suppose every airline was similarly bad. In that case, we could chalk this off as a systemic issue as the travel industry gets going again after such a long period of low capacity. However, since that isn’t the case (well, certainly not this badly), the most likely culprit is that JetBlue cut too deeply during the pandemic and then got caught with its pants down when travel demand spiked faster than anticipated, outstripping its ability to hire and train employees and manage continuing staff absences due to Covid.

Which, quite simply, makes this an abject failure of corporate leadership.

Digging into the numbers a little, JetBlue has been accused of misusing the $1.5bn in government payroll assistance it received: taking the money and using it to fund short-term profits rather than maintain payroll as it said it would. And, well, the shitty experience I described above and this week’s dive in stock price is the direct result.

The stock nose-dived again this week as JetBlue announced for the second time this year that it will be reducing flight capacity, now providing a prediction of zero growth, as the CEO stated a need to “Get back to basics and get back to delivering a reliable operation.” Well, he’s got a lot of basics to get back to since, as best as I can tell, JetBlue leads the pack in flight cancellations and major delays. Not to mention the 3+ hour wait time for customer assistance, by phone or via text.

This places JetBlue in a precarious position. They don’t have the scale of a United or a Delta, and they don’t have the low cost of operations of a Spirit. This means that ongoing success as a “mid-tier” operator requires them to be more brand-driven than competitors, where the brand experience is the critical factor driving preference. Unfortunately for them, when this experience fails, preference quickly gets shot to hell.

Let’s recap; they almost ruined my vacation, the stock is down nearly 50% over the past 12 months, they can’t get the basics right, they’re not growing while their competition is, they’re ranked as the worst airline in the country, they’ve been accused of misusing bailout money, and they don’t seem to have anything even approximating a strategy. (Unless you call buying Spirit a strategy. Me? I call it a cynical and lazy attempt to create monopolistic pricing power in the NorthEast corridor that’s likely to be halted by a more aggressive regulatory approach to market consolidation).

Anyway, this isn’t just a real-time case study of how short-termism and lousy leadership can drive a company into the ground; more fundamentally, it’s unclear to me whether JetBlue can even survive as an independent company.

Speaking as a formerly loyal flyer with many JetBlue points and status, I will not be flying with them again for a very, very long time. Perhaps never.

2. For Those About To Change. We Salute You.

tl;dr: Accenture gets its Song on. Goes all AC/DC on us.

Oh my. I’m sorry. I. Just. Can’t. Stop. Laughing. I can’t catch my breath. Oh goodness me. Just give me a second. I’ll be OK in a minute. The tears are streaming down my face. Oh, good God. This is bad. This is really bad. Anyone who works there must want a hole to open up and swallow them. Oh my. I think I just snorted some coffee out my nose.

Yeah, you guessed it, I’m talking about the shiny, newly re-branded Accenture Interactive that will henceforth be known as…drumroll, please…Accenture Song, with the tagline “Let there be change.” If you’re going to rip off AC/DC song titles, they should really have gone with “For Those About To Change, We Salute You.” Although, clearly, “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap” wouldn’t have worked. Accenture has never done a dirty deed cheaply, and they’re unlikely to start now. I do wish, however, that they’d just ripped the Band-Aid off and gone with Accenture Song: Big Balls.

OK. I’ve had my fun. Let’s get the sensible stuff out of the way first. Was the interactive part of Accenture Interactive looking increasingly anachronistic as they acquired more businesses and interactivity became increasingly commoditized? Yes. Was there likely much wailing and gnashing of teeth and politicking while trying to build custom client solutions out of 40 different acquired entities and all of their independent P&Ls? Almost certainly.

There’s nothing daft at all about moving on from “interactive” and integrating the acquisitions under a single P&L. That demonstrates an understanding of how better to compete and win against the random, financialized portfolio model of the advertising holding companies.

It’s the oh-so-try-hard way they’ve done it that’s cringe-worthy. The name is, well, meh. But, whatever. At a minimum, it’s a bit strange to jam a word like Song beside a made-up name like Accenture. It certainly wouldn’t have been high on my list of recommendations, and it does leave you wondering whether there’s anyone with naming experience in the newly branded entity.

The ultraboring logo is just plain baffling. Why remove the Accenture arrow they’ve spent hundreds of millions of dollars building equity in? Why eliminate the corporate purple? And why use a by now hackneyed and cliched gradient that makes it look like nothing more than a Stripe API?

Then we get to the goldmine that is the press release, which I can only describe as a garbled mess liberally festooned with corporately creative buzzwords, zero narrative arc or clarity, and a distinct lack of opportunity for the reader to take a breath. Here’s a snapshot:

The move reflects the company’s post-pandemic world-class services that reinvent customer connections, sales, commerce and marketing and business innovation to meet clients’ accelerated demand for business growth through sustained customer relevance at the ever-changing speed of life.

Now, I dare you to try and say that out loud without A. Collapsing in embarrassment, or B. Collapsing due to asphyxiation as you try to say the whole sentence in a single breath.

The sad thing is the sheer obviousness of the so-called insight the planning intern working on this piece of internal business came up with. It boils down to the idea that companies don’t think they’re changing fast enough, so Accenture Song will help them move more quickly. More specifically, to stay relevant at the speed of life. Now, I know what you’re thinking. Yeah, me too. The more appropriate song title is probably “The Song Remains The Same,” as this is literally the same insight every consulting company has worked with for, I don’t know, 50 odd years. It used to be the speed of change, the speed of digital, the speed of technology, or whatever. Now it’s the speed of life. Which, I’m guessing, is meant to reflect some kind of humanization of technology but just leaves me thinking of old people, turtles, trees, and the fact that unless you’re a mosquito or a mouse, or an adrenaline junkie, life is generally fairly slow-moving.

So, yeah, it’s unfortunate that more and better thought didn’t go into this. As a result, this is less a strategy and more a random agglomeration of consultingy words. It’s far from inspiring, and it’s very notable that while David Droga has been rolled out across the usual trade rags claiming how groundbreaking this new approach is, the company with his name on it isn’t included. Yes, Droga5 will not be singing from the same sheet as Song. Make of that what you will.

Before I go, I want to leave you with a final thought that I just can’t get out of my head. Yes, I’m picturing how they’ll likely torture the Song metaphor until it bleeds. Can you imagine the client meetings where they introduce their engagement managers as “conductors of the orchestra,” and their consultants as “songsmiths,” and their workstreams as “melodies,” and where they force-fit song titles into the title slide of every deck? Oh yeah, me too.

Oh God, I’ve set myself off again. I’m dying here. This is just too funny.