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What do Leaders do: Different or differently?

Rahul K.
Apr 19, 2017
3 min read

Last time I wrote a blog on the topic "why one who failed, failed”. On Feb 13, While walking through airport Lobby at Kuala Lumpur, I was staring at AirAsia aircraft, which was the only aircraft painted with product advertisement of a movie, standing among other airlines’ aircraft and as always, I was pondering, what separated a leading business from rest of its cohort?

Becoming a business leader is difficult, but sustaining it is a whole new game whether, it be for a new or for an existing business. I believe that Leading businesses don’t do different things, but they do things differently. Most businesses have contingencies in place for known risks, but for unknown events or events that are ought to happen, one just waits to witness their fall. Eg.:

Profound operating losses in airline business
Decline of products ensuing its life cycle through introduction, growth and maturity
Resistance to disruptive innovation

These are only a sample of events, which have been accepted as fate by majority of businesses.

In airline industry, majority of companies maintain their fleet strength to match the highest demand of the year and all companies operate on same busy routes. This ultimately impacts their load factor, severing operating margin. But this is not the case with all airline companies, a few companies who have recognized the gap in demand and supply chose to follow a more profitable direction:

Targeted new and ignored, but promising routes (eg. AirAsia, Allegiant, Spirit Airlines, RyanAir etc.)
Fleet is built to match one of the lowest demands of the year
Majority of aircrafts in fleet are of same type reducing total maintenance cost
Reducing wait time between consecutive take-offs adding more flights everyday
Adding innovative ways for revenue (eg. AirAsia has product ads painted outside its aircraft)

I have flown on Spirit Airlines and paid as low as US$25 for flight between Cleveland, OH and Los Angeles, CA in 2016. Similar has been case with Air Asia, where I ended up paying US$65 for a 4 hours’ flight from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to Kolkata, India.

Product life cycle is not less known to any business, still majority accepts decline of products as a natural phenomenon for succession. But there are also companies, who have sustained maturity for long, even forever, hence delaying decline phase:

They followed voice of product and innovated existing products through subtraction, addition, unification, multiplication and attribute dependence change
They spun their product’s life cycle between early and late maturity phase

Not long ago, people thought wrist watches will be gone, since smart phones had been substituting their value. But legendary companies like Fossil, Swiss, Kate Spade etc created smart watches, that now complement smart phones, making watch’s life cycle to oscillate between early and late maturity stage.

Every other day innovations happen across this world. But resistance to change and inappropriate segmentation and positioning, altogether, kill majority of the disruptive innovations. Blackberry's Playbook, Google Glasses are few of the incredible innovations, which died not because these were useless, but because they failed to identify and convince right advocates of their true value to this world. On the other hand, companies like Tesla, Apple, Uber, AirBnB, Postmates, Amazon etc also began their operations against usual notion of this world. Despite being new they identified right niche and determined appropriate positioning, in the beginning, and displayed great perseverance to convince rest of the world that they are quintessential for keeping up with current lifestyle.