REFLECTIONS OF AN
Article by Dr Michael S. Galvin Mobility Services Limited
mobilityserviceslimited.com
Our world has changed, have you?
At one time UK business schools focused almost exclusively on ‘change’. In the seventies and up until the early 2,000s, management practice, it was claimed, was stuck in the world of military based leadership. Things were orderly, structured, process driven and management thinking was allegedly constrained and therefore concepts such as blue sky and out of the box style thinking were seen as new, virtuous and progressive. More recently, ‘it’s all about the data’, has become the maxim and has led to a situation whereby modern managers and consul- tants have exchanged management experience and judgement based on a range of hard and soft factors for formulas, spreadsheets and algorithms that only consider hard measures. Once again this approach is seen as progressive and new.
One of the valuable lessons that I learnt, and forgive me that it’s pretty obvious, is that when the world around you is changing, doing the same things i.e. not changing is not the smartest approach. In fact, for many years when employing new heads of, and/or managers or indeed aspiring managers, I provided them with a reading list that I expected them to read prior to starting work with us. One book, a very short book, ‘Who moved my cheese’? by Spencer Johnson was the shortest, but I believe a very important book and I raise it in this article as it is very relevant to this industry today.
Change is messy and painful
I guess we can all claim to like change, but I suspect we only like the change(s) that we initiate. Change that is forced upon us is disarming, disturbing and normally unwanted but that does not stop it happening. In this industry most businesses have seen considerable change forced upon them since the turn of the century together with regulatory change, cyclical business level impacts and of course Covid.
We are now, I would suggest, in perhaps a more momentous period of externally led change than we
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have experienced thus far. To what do I relate? To the impact of multi-apping. In many parts of the country multi-apping is turning the industry on its head. It is the wild west for operators and customers and devastating to customer propositions and service levels. Councils and policy makers are starting to feel uncomfortable about customers, often vulnerable people, being left to struggle to try and get home in busy city centres late at night. Mutterings of personal safety concerns have arisen from some councils. So what has been the industry’s response………to pretty much ignore it and carry on doing the same old thing. Buy the book mentioned above and see what happened to the mouse which followed that strategy. The new reality is messy, its painful and it’s a change, so let’s recognise it and deal with it!
What has happened?
A brief, clinical reprise of recent events I guess would focus on driver shortages in 2021/2 where operators almost ubiquitously complained of having lots of work but not enough drivers. The lack of drivers appeared to be the commonly identified cause of this problem whereas although the lack of drivers was only a contributory factor surely the lack of applying basic economics was the root cause. Putting up prices would burn off some demand but if also translated into higher fares would encourage supply i.e. more drivers. I concede life is never that simple BUT it was missing from almost any argument I heard and instead of looking at how we run our businesses it was easier to blame the big bad licensing authorities (some of whom deserved some blame of course), Brexit and delivery industry jobs.
MAY 2024 PHTM
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