Heat Death of a Company
I've only just seen this story about United's vast incompetence with a child traveling alone - the key part of the story to me is how every single person that the parents talked to tried to push them off. Things like this happened over and over again, after the child in question got stranded in Chicago (no one met her to help her get to ger connection, and believe me - O'Hare can be intimidating to anyone who's not an experienced traveler):
The attendants were busy and could not help her she told us. She told them she had a flight to catch to camp and they told her to wait. She asked three times to use a phone to call us and they told her to wait. When she missed the flight she asked if someone had called camp to make sure they knew and they told her “yes—we will take care of it”. No one did. She was sad and scared and no one helped.
That's a corporate culture problem. There's no easy fix for that, because it represents a break between management and labor that is too wide to bridge over. The only real fix for United here is failure, followed by the parts being swept up by companies that aren't broken. Even then, many of the current employees are going to be problems, because they've been too ingrained in this dead culture...
