Some corp decisions are made for less than business-like reasons: Witness the Cathay cockpit sex scandal.

This is not an uplifting story, but it is an interesting and instructive one!

This might surprise you--especially if you think that all the decisions made by a big corporation are decided on with perfect logic and careful planning.  If you think that, you've got a big surprise in store--it just isn't so.  In the news these days is a case in point that involves Cathay Airline's plan to roll-out a new advertising campaign that now has to be postponed or revisited entirely, all because of some less than professional behavior by one pilot and one flight attendant.  It is the story of the Cathay Airlines cockpit sex scandal. 

Sex in the cockpit anybody?

The story, simply, is this: Still and video images have circulated on the internet which show a Cathay Pacific flight attendant performing oral sex on a pilot in the cockpit of a Cathay Pacific jumbo-jetliner.  The company says that the pair not longer works for the firm and that the deed was not necessarily performed while the plane was in the air--but they stopped short of a categorical denial of it happening then either!  

To make matter worse, media entities in China have re-created the scenes that were shown in Chinese media; the actual images are easy-enough to find on YouTube for the rest of the world.  This all comes at the worse possible time, just as Cathay Pacific was about to launch it's next phase of a very successful advertising campaign, "People and Service," which depicts employess in both uniform and ordinary clothes with personal stories about them in real-life.  

When exactly might the time have been better?

"The timing of this scandal really could not have been worse in marketing terms," the South China Morning Post quoted an unnamed Cathay Pacific exec as saying. "A whole new set of pictures of staff in off-duty poses has been taken for the next phase of what has been an enormously effective global campaign. But the scope for the slogan and the campaign to be misinterpreted, or ridiculed and lampooned, in light of the cockpit incident is obvious. So it looks like it's going to be postponed at least for a while."

Although it is easy to think that big companies are always serious, strategic, and deliberate in all they do, the reality frequently is very different, not so much because management wants it to be that way, but because of circumstances beyond the firm's control.  After all, who contemplated that a pilot commanding a huge 747 jumbo airliner filled with people, would decided to, well, have sex with a flight attendant?

Meet the team that will make you feel special.

I bet the passengers weren't thinking that was an option; I bet the corporate execs weren't thinking that that was in the flight plan, either.  I am very sure that the ad agency people didn't have that in mind either when they decided on an ad campaign with the theme, "Meet the team who goes the extra mile to make you feel special."  

Life takes funny twists and--sometimes less than ideal--turns down the road of LIfe.  If you doubt that, just ask the executives and the stockholders and the advertising team at Cathay Pacific Air!