My enquiry into leadership has led me to ‘Family, Village, Tribe – The Story of the Flight Centre’. Started by two 23 year old veterinarians from Australia with no business experience, the book tracks the journey of one of the co-founders, Graham “Skroo” Turner, who took an idea hatched in a Munich beer hall and developed it into a billion dollar global company with 7,600 people and over 1,500 businesses over 40 countries.
The theme central to the book is the idea that rather than trying to run the company as a typical corporate business – forcing people to fit the changing company mould, that it is essential to structure a business to suit the way people prefer to work. Recognizing that the early success of the Flight Centre was due in a large part to the fact that people enjoyed working there, that they worked in small highly effecient teams that enjoyed a high degree of autonomy, “Skroo” realized that as the company was evolving from a small company to a global corporation that it was becoming less productive, was loosing sight of its core values and was in danger of imploding.
In the early stages of the company, business guidance was sought from the works of Michael Gerber (The E myth), Michael Le Boeuf (How to Motivate People) and Jim Collins (Good to Great) – however it was the book ‘Executive Instinct’ by Professor Nigel Nicholson that led to ‘Skroo’ to the realization in 1995 that the Flight Centre had unconsciously been emulating ‘hunter – gather tribes’ when it came to leadership, and this was a turning point for subsequent expansion. Nicholson argued that our ancestral environment consisted of small family sized teams of up to seven people in loose – knit tribal networks and that as you grew a team over a certain size that productivity went down and profits suffered.
The company restructured into “families” of up to seven people in its retail shops, “villages” of three to five geographical teams that support one another and “tribes” – a maximum of around 25 teams with a single tribal identity that come together for celebration and interaction.
If you want to know the rest – you are going to need to read the book, but I can tell you that it is a fascinating read and it is interesting to think that a theory founded in anthropology could be so relevant to modern businesses. It is also interesting to read how the key elements to a healthy human civilization are identified as having their basis in individual autonomy and sense of self as well as sharing. This is a theme that has come up before as part of this enquiry into leadership and is futher evidence that hierarchical, ego based business models no longer have a place in today’s business world.
