I’m on commercial airplanes frequently and have been for many years. It has become much more difficult to make related positive comments. Enter Richard Branson and Virgin American Airlines on the west coast and now whenever they go where I need to go, VA is the airline of choice.
While I am predisposed to like anything Branson, I have watched the VA safety video more times in the last year than I have watched any other airline safety video in the last ten years. Why? Because it’s creative, energizing, and fun. At the same time, it conveys important and required safety information that was previously ignored. The video represents the Virgin brand exceptionally well and reinforces that Virgin has something the others do not.
We all have things under our control that are way less than what they should be. Things that don’t fit with what we are trying to accomplish. Things that conflict with how we want to live and the success we want to achieve. Some have existed for so long that we accept the unacceptable as the norm and effectively no longer even see it, just as travelers no longer see the traditional safety videos. Workarounds are created for compliance so that what needs to get done gets done and what could be better never is.
What is the unacceptable that has become your norm? Fix it and you can hold your head high again.
We all have a personal brand, some of it good, some not so good. Lack of continuity confuses. Building continuity requires thought and action. I’m the Outsider and that’s what I think.
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Hi Randy – a great post. This is like the old adage about “boiling the frog” (which has since been proven to be false), but it still applies. We can get so caught up in the mundane that we forget what we’re trying to achieve.
Every once in a while, as leaders we have to force ourselves to have an out-of-body experience (ie, look at our daily work practices from a third party perspective), then recall our goals and core values to see if there is good alignment. If there’s too much of a gap, it’s time for recalibration. not always successful, but it’s part of my standard work for Friday afternoons.