Please forgive my months of silence. I appreciate all the folks who have asked if I am OK (I am fine!) and who have urged me to start blogging again. You will start hearing more here about what I've been doing the last six months. The short story is that Huggy Rao and I have been working like crazy on Scaling Up Excellence, our book that will be published in early 2014. We just have a few finishing touches after putting seven years or so into this project. Then I will start talking about it — this book has been quite an adventure and we are already talking to a lot of different groups about the main ideas.
Meanwhile, I was moved to do a post because, as we have written the book, one of the themes that has moved center stage, and I've blogged about before, is accountability: How it is a hallmark of organizations that spread and sustain excellence (and its absence of a hallmark of bad ones). This problem was especially evident in United Airlines' poor treatment of my friend's young daughter last summer. As counterpoint, a friend sent me this note of apology he got from Delta. Note I have removed his name and account number. Obviously, airlines can't control things like the weather and other systemic delays — but when leaders step-up and do this kind of thing, it creates a lot of goodwill — and is evidence that they are taking responsibility and trying to fix things.
|
|
Please Accept Our |
|
|
|
|
Dear _____________, On behalf of Delta Air Lines, I would like to extend my personal apology for I am truly sorry your travel was adversely affected by our service failure. We value you as a customer and sincerely appreciate your support of Delta. To It is our goal to provide exceptional service on every occasion, and I hope Sincerely, Jason Hausner |
|
Leave a Reply