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Positive outlook for business travel
As business travel worldwide continues to enjoy solid growth, traveling executives are enjoying even greater comfort, security and flexibility. Airlines, airport operators, hotels and other travel suppliers are investing heavily to enhance their products and services in order to help ease the strain of frequent travel.
Services that were once perceived as an added benefit, often used by travel suppliers to differentiate themselves from their rivals, are now provided as standard across the industry. Electronic-tickets, self-service check-in kiosks, online bookings, flat beds in business class, in-room Wi-Fi, spas, and club floors in hotels – these are now products and services that executives are coming to expect as part of their business travel experience.
Many of these developments are in response to demands from corporate travelers to make business travel more productive and cost effective, but they also reflect an increasing awareness that executives need to retain a sense of wellbeing and comfort while on the road. This is becoming particularly important as corporate travelers venture further afield and into new, less developed markets.
Continued growth
Business travel remains strong in most regions of the world, according to the latest findings from the airline industry. Significant growth in airline capacity, particularly in Asia Pacific, the Middle East, Africa and Europe, indicates a continued upturn in business travel in these regions, although higher fuel costs are starting to have an impact worldwide.
According to the latest statistics from OAG, which monitors flight schedules worldwide, airlines increased flight capacity by 2% in October, compared with October 2004.
Flights to and from Africa are up 10%, 9% for flights to and from the Middle East; and flights to and from both Europe and the Asia/Pacific region are up 7%. China is once again the scene of massive industry growth. The number of flights to and from China this month is up 12%, while the number of domestic flights is up 18%.
OAG managing director Duncan Alexander said although these figures do not distinguish leisure from business traffic, they give a good indication of growth in business travel to this region. “When you look at figures for China in particular, the prime mover is business,” he said. “This is largely driven by international traffic as the Chinese airlines widen their networks and more and more airlines start flying there. As there is more corporate investment, the Chinese government is gradually allowing more and more countries to enter the market, opening up new routes and opportunities.”
OAG also revealed that nine of the top 30 airports with the highest additional seat capacity growth are located in China (see table).
“Dubai also showed significant growth with increases of 79,500 additional seats,” added Alexander. “This reflects higher demand from both business and leisure travelers in the United Arab Emirates, and aggressive international expansion by its major airlines.”
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Corporate culture
Corporate culture is the collective behavior of people using common corporate visions, goals, values, beliefs, habits, working language, systems, and symbols. It is interwoven with processes, technologies, learning and significant events. In addition, different individuals bring to the workplace their own uniqueness, knowledge, and ethnic culture. So corporate culture encompasses moral, social, and behavioral norms of your organization based on the values, beliefs, attitudes, and priorities of its members. Corporate culture is the shared values and meanings that members hold in common and that are practiced by an organization’s leaders. I think that organizational and corporate culture are formal and informal. They can be studied by observation, by listening and interacting with people in the culture, and by reading what the company says about its own culture, by understanding career path progressions, and by observing stories about the company. Corporate culture is related to ethics through the values and leadership styles that the leaders practice, the company model, the rituals and symbols that organizations value, and the way organizational executeves and members communicate among themselves. As a culture, the corporation defines not only jobs and roles it is also sets goals and establishes what counts as success.
Adaptive Cultures
Your corporate culture is good only if it fits its context, i.e. your business space and your business strategy. In today’s rapidly changing economy, only cultures that can help organizations anticipate and adapt to environmental change will be associated with superior performance over the long time. Research findings show that cultures that are externally oriented (e.g. risk taking, readiness to meet new challenges) tend to be more strongly associated with organizational performance than do those cultures which are bureaucratic and predominantly internally focused.
The three levels
Edgar Shein describes the three levels of a corporate culture:
1.Surface level: At this level, culture is both enacted and reinforced through visible appearances and behaviors, such as physical layouts, dress codes, organizational structure, company policies, procedures and programs, and attitudes.
2.Middle level: Here, culture is manifested through our beliefs and values.
3. Deepest level: At this level, culture is manifested through basic assumptions – our long-learned, automatic responses and established opinions.
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Victoria Beckham's plan to wow Hollywood with her style took a turn for the worse yesterday. Ms Beckham, a.k.a. Posh Spice from the pop band the Spice Girls, was named by the 85-year-old fashion guru Richard Blackwell as 2007's Worst Dressed Celebrity. The acid-tongued critic Mr Blackwell designed dresses for Hollywood’s rich and famous in the 1950s and 60s and started compiling his lists of the world’s best and worst-dressed stars in 1960. They are now greatly looked forward to, or perhaps not in Ms Beckham’s case, by Hollywood’s dedicated followers of fashion. Mr Blackwell said Posh wore “one skinny-mini monstrosity after another”. His attack on Posh comes exactly a decade after he put the Spice Girls at number one of his list, saying they were "the only spices on the planet that have no taste".
Ms Beckham moved to Los Angeles last year, when her footballer husband David signed up with the LA Galaxy team. She quickly made friends with stars such as Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes and ventured into the fashion industry. Posh launched her own denim and accessories collections in an attempt to become a global brand. She has also appeared on US TV shows and has written a book on style, called “That Extra Half An Inch: Hair, Heels And Everything In Between”. The second-worst-dressed woman was another Brit, troubled singer Amy Winehouse. Mr Blackwell said Britney Spears would also have made this year’s list but he felt it was “inappropriate…when her personal life is in such upheaval”. The best-dressed female celebs included Nicole Kidman and Angelina Jolie.
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