A fun exercise for tonight: Tell us how you'd fix a company

[jmowreader]

Every company has something wrong with it, no matter how good the company is. Pick one and tell us what you'd do to make it better.

You can choose to improve the company's product, its service or its operations. Or all three.

And as every company is broken in some way, every game has rules. This one has two: you can't choose Wal-Mart because there's no way to fix what's wrong with it even if you close the doors, and "shut it down" isn't one of the things you can do.

[jmowreader]

1. Since it's my game, I'll go first...

Or second, or third, or whatever. I'm going to fix the Coca-Cola Company.

And I'm going to do two things: get rid of the goon squads, and get the high fructose corn syrup out of my products. I'll also research the possibility of removing the phosphoric acid from my sodas--this shit just strips the calcium out of your body.

[xray s]

2. GM

1. Quickly develop alternative fuel / hybrid products

2. Take the Saturn pricing policy across the board. Offer all buyers the same, good deal. Make buying a car as easy as buying any other consumer product.

3. Agressively promote opening Medicare up to all Americans, getting GM out of the health insurance administration business.

[MercutioATC]

3. The Air Traffic branch of the FAA.

Actually, this isn't a novel idea, it's been done...at the FAA a couple of years ago.

Safety is our primary concern as air traffic controllers (it's not the FAA's primary concern any more, but that's another thread...)

A couple of years ago the agency instituted a program in which they set an unrealistically low expectation for the number of operational errors (when two planes get too close) for each facility. If a facility met this number, time off awards (extra vacation time) were awarded to the controllers at that facility.

Cleveland Center, one of the busiest facilities in the world, beat the number...reducing errors by 40% from the previous year. We each got an extra week of vacation time.

We didn't take our jobs any more seriously...that's not possible. Our first concern is ALWAYS safety. What happened is the program united the facility. I didn't just look at MY airspace, I looked at the airspace NEXT to mine and volunteered options to the next controller because HIS success was essential to MY success. Overall, we ALL succeeded.

Since then (under Bush) the FAA has decided that the stick is more efficient than the carrot. There are FAR too many individual problems to describe in detail, but suffice it to say that we're generally NOT a happy workforce. Will that effect our committment to safety? Absolutely not. However, we're not what we could be. We're not what we WANT to be.

Should we be coddled? Absolutely not. Should we have an environment where we can do our best work? I'd hope EVERYBODY would be behind that.

That's what I'd change...not only in the FAA, but everywhere. Train an experienced workforce and give them the tools and the environment to succeed.

That's what it's really all about.

[dweller]

4. pick a media outlet

apply this code.
http://www.spj.org/ethics_code.asp


rinse, repeat.
dp