Blooming Amazing!

There used to be a joke that BA stood for Bloody Awful, and I have to admit that I found the official ad to celebrate the centenary of British Airways this year, if not completely awful, then certainly underwhelming.

Retailers, airlines and other service brands are highly dependent on their people. Employee Engagement is often spoken about in conjunction with Purpose when it comes to brands with a significant public interface. But is Engagement enough? I read an interesting document from Imperative - The Workforce Purpose Index 2019 recently, which puts forward the notion that perhaps we should move on from Employee Engagement to Employee Fulfillment. Probably not a bad thought - "Engagement" for me has connotations either of busy bees or toilets. The report also contains a radical suggestion - "put employees before customers" - which is definitely worthy of discussion at a later stage.

Cut back to BA, and I was delighted to discover another idea to celebrate the centenary. To me the film above - and the idea behind it - couldn't say more about the ingenuity, creativity, dedication, skill and teamwork of BA people. 

BA Quality Engineer Lyndon Ooi is also a composer, violinist and leader of the BA Colleague Orchestra. He has taken the Flower Duet aria from Delibes' opera Lakme, that everyone associates with the airline, and composed/arranged 10 variations to take the listener through 10 decades of the airline's past, present and future.

What a supersonic idea - blooming amazing, in fact!