When Austrian Gustav Baldauf, a former pilot with 14,000 hours of flying experience, took over as chief operating officer at Air India in the troubled times of 2008, many thought it was the turning point that the beleaguered airline had been waiting for. Its day-to-day operations needed as much fixing as its mounting debt and loss of market share did.
Yet, on February 28, when Baldauf resigned from the company, it looked like the cause had been lost. Operations were as muddled as before: The merger of Air India and Indian Airlines was still on paper with the two wings operating pretty much independently; there was a strike notice from the staff union; debt had mounted to Rs. 15,000 crore; two more senior officials — Pawan Arora, COO of Air India Express and Stephen Sukumar, chief training officer — had also quit.
And, at least to casual observers, it looked like the new civil aviation minister, Vayalar Ravi, had taken things in his own hands, undermining the nascent turnaround strategy that was being put in place. A career trade unionist who had been in the labour movement for nearly 60 years, Ravi sent shivers down the collective spine of pro-reform forces. It was a reasonable question to ask if Air India was slipping out of the control of the business-side guys such as Chairman and Managing Director Arvind Jadhav.
It turns out that reality is quite different. Baldauf may not exactly have been the face of reform that was defeated by status quoists. Instead, he alienated himself from the agenda by missing the cultural nuances of a giant public sector company and the bureaucratic compulsions that come with it.
Perhaps, he handled Air India like a private company, which it isn’t. “Captain Baldauf made dozens of presentations on what needed to be done. Unfortunately he was unable to execute any of it,’’ says a senior executive who had worked closely with him. The COO’s biggest failure was the inability to realise that even though the merger was complete on paper, employees were still operating under two entirely different conditions. Below the general manager level (98 percent of the workforce), they were actually two different airlines, Nacil A and Nacil I. He came at the problem assuming he was dealing with one. The pitch, roll and yaw — Captain Baldauf lost control of all.
16/03/11 Cuckoo Paul/Forbes India/IBN Live
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