Workers v. McKinsey
This one was kind of a package deal ...
Yesterday, I wrote about a how Delta Air Lines turns planes around faster, and thus achieves a better on-time rate.
In short, they try to push planes away from the gate at a 45 degree angle when they can, instead of the more standard 90-degree turn. It saves a minute or two each time, and it all adds up.
Best of all, it was frontline Delta employees who came up with the idea. I love Delta listened to them, instead of bringing in some high-priced, big name consultants to tell airlines how to do their jobs better.
Oh, what's that?
A group of high-priced, big name consultants, actually did try to tell airlines how to do their jobs better?
Let's compare the two.
Enter McKinsey & Co., perhaps the only consulting company that is as selective as Delta Air Lines.
About 1 percent of McKinsey applicants get jobs with the firm; similarly at one time about 1 percent of Delta Air Lines flight attendant applicants got hired at Delta.
(Compare these numbers to a 3 percent acceptance rate at Harvard.)
Writing on the McKinsey website, four McKinsey partners who specialize in aviation proposed 10 things they think airlines should do differently in order to speed up their aircraft turnarounds.
Here are very brief summaries of their 10 ideas. (I kind of felt like I had to share this since I had it handy after yesterday’s newsletter. Also, I went from hardly ever traveling to taking a bunch of airplane trips in very short order recently.)
1. Gate agents shouldn't walk down the jetway to check whether aircraft are ready for boarding.
Flight attendants can simply tell the gate agents via radio or intercom. There's no reason for the gate agent to take a 1-minute roundtrip walk down the jetway.
2. Get rid of those "place your carry on here" boxes to judge if a bag is too big.
These are hard to use and too prone to "false positives," meaning bags that can fit fine but look as if they can't in the box. Since employees know this, they sometimes act too leniently, and look the other way when passengers try to bring truly oversize bags aboard.
3. Get rid of the "approved" carry on tags.
This is "a process that adds no value and that no customer would pay for," the McKinsey consultants write.
4. Get rid of check-in altogether.
Yes, this would be a radical step for most airlines, but as McKinsey writes, "it is the poster child for a process that adds no value for customers." (Go McKinsey with this idea!) I think the idea is to check passengers in at the gate, on the assumption that since most passengers have nonrefundable fares, no-shows are pretty rare.
5. Don't have cleaning crews buckle seatbelts.
This looks nice but wastes time: both because the cleaners spend time buckling them, but also because passengers have to unbuckle them to use them.
6. Have different turnaround processes for on-time and delayed flights.
I have to admit, this makes sense. Do the full process when planes are on time, and limit it to true essentials when flights are delayed.
7. Figure out places besides the gate where aircraft can be serviced.
This one is a bit complicated, but basically it suggests finding ways to speed up the turnaround time by doing some of the work before or after the airplane is at the gate.
8. Don't have flight attendants count passengers.
At the very least, to speed up the process in this era of almost-always full flights, count the number of empty seats and subtract that from capacity. That will always be faster.
9. Figure out what's truly routine and what's not routine.
Again, a bit too complicated to summarize--but in short, they say that airlines that don't keep track of the things that they have to fix on planes that seem out of the ordinary, don't actually realize that some of this maintenance is likely predictable.
10. Insist that every contract you enter into includes provisions to try to make the processes leaner over time.
In other words, the McKinsey consultants say don't just squeeze contractors' margins every year to increase profits. Instead, build incentives into their contracts to come up with leaner processes. That way you'll both do better.
O.K. who wins, the workers or the consultants? Let us know in the comments.
7 other things …
One person has died and 49 people have become ill following an E. coli outbreak linked to McDonald’s Quarter Pounder hamburgers, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Tuesday. Most cases have been reported in Colorado and Nebraska. Initial investigations have suggested that the slivered onions served on Quarter Pounders are a “likely source of contamination,” according to the C.D.C., which cited the Food and Drug Administration. (NY Times)
A suspected drunk driver going the wrong way on a freeway came within inches of colliding with Kamala Harris’s motorcade. The driver was travelling in the opposite direction on I-94 in downtown Milwaukee, Wisconsin on Monday night as the US vice-president’s entourage hurtled past. (Yahoo News)
Squeezed by a steady decline in the national birth rate that’s shrinking the pool of college applicants, some colleges and universities are rushing to sell off prized assets — housing complexes, presidential mansions, apartments, even some paintings — to receive an injection of cash and, for the most vulnerable of the lot, stave off the financial collapse that has already done in many others. (Bloomberg)
Arkansas is sitting on a $150 billion 'hidden treasure' trove of lithium that could meet the global demand for EV batteries by 2030. The US Geological Survey (USGS) found between five and 19 million tons of lithium in the Smackover Formation, which is nine times the amount needed to meet the ongoing electric vehicle demand in the US by the end of the decade. (Daily Mail)
Sales of existing homes in the U.S. are on track for the worst year since 1995—for the second year in a row. Persistently high home prices and elevated mortgage rates are keeping potential home buyers on the sidelines. Sales of previously owned homes in the first nine months of the year were lower than the same period last year, the National Association of Realtors said Wednesday. (WSJ)
An audit uncovered a total of 20 non-U.S. citizens out of 8.2 million registered voters in Georgia, according to findings announced by Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on Wednesday. Nine of those 20 noncitizens cast ballots in the past, while the other 11 were registered but never actually voted, the audit showed. Election officials canceled their voter registrations and reported them to district attorneys for possible prosecution. (Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
Chinese residents have been illicitly moving billions of dollars out of the country under authorities’ noses as a cratering property market and economic uncertainties push people to find safer places to park their wealth overseas. Moving fortunes out of China is hard: The country imposes strict capital controls that cap individual purchases of foreign exchange at $50,000 a year. Violators can receive big fines, or even prison sentences, if they break the law. (WSJ)
Thanks for reading. Photo credit: Photo by Ashim D’Silva on Unsplash. I used the same one as yesterday as I thought it was kind of funny. I wrote about some of this before at Inc.com. See you in the comments!
This one is getting some replies! Having rarely used consultants myself (I was so sheltered, the first time I even heard of McKinsey was when Chelsea Clinton got hired there out of Stanford in about 2002 or 2003), my sense is that whether their ideas are good or bad, they provide cover.
If you have to explain to a board why you choose X, if you can say, we hired McKinsey and it was their idea, you've got cover.
It takes something else to say, we changed our procedure on the advice of our gate agents!
Where do you think McKinsey gets their "ideas" from? They interview the workers!!!! Most consultants run around within a company talking to the employees about what they would change and then regurgitate that back in their "report". I would say all of their recommendations were obtained in this manner.