warring [ˈwɔːrɪŋ] 交战的, 互相掐架的 arguing or fighting with each other. warring factions/parties/sides. When egos clash in the workplace, owners and managers cannot afford to do nothing, because the business is likely to be the ultimate loser. Ego clashes are nasty, destructive diseases that can harm businesses large and small. Many of us will have witnessed the symptoms. These can include one person deliberately failing to consult a colleague when they should, or failing to include them in group activity at work or after hours. Sometimes warring factions ignore each other and in the process create an uncomfortable atmosphere for others. At other times they might clash or deliberately talk over each other in meetings. They might secretly seek to undermine their opponent to colleagues. Sometimes things can spill over and get ugly, leading to the unsightly spectacle of workplace shouting matches 互骂 or worse. ego [ˈi:ɡəu] I. [countable] the opinion that you have of yourself and your own importance. a guy with a huge ego. boost someone's ego (=make them feel more confident): She needed something to boost her ego. a bruised ego 自信心受挫. 挫败. 挫伤. 重创 (=a loss of confidence): The occurrence left him with a badly bruised ego. II. [singular] in psychology, the conscious part of the mind that is responsible for thinking and understanding. ego trip a situation in which you feel important or admired and only care about increasing these feelings. She's a serious writer, not just some kid on an ego trip. massage someone's ego to do or say things that make someone feel special or important. alter ego I. a part of someone's personality that is different from their usual personality and that other people do not usually see. II. a very close friend. egotistical [ˌi:ɡəuˈtɪstɪk(ə)l] 以自我为中心的, 自以为是的 thinking that you are more important than other people and need not care about them. excessively conceited or absorbed in oneself; self-centred. "he's selfish, egotistical, and arrogant".
Mayday: How warring egos forced Qantas off course: Joyce had just turned 37, and willingly accepted the chance of a lifetime. Dixon had resisted the urgings 敦促 of other senior Qantas executives to appoint someone they knew better, instead of the new recruit from Ansett. However, Dixon wanted an executive with out-of-the-box thinking. He did not want someone whose judgment would be clouded by historic aviation practices. Joyce fitted the mould to a tee. It was a bold new venture and the success or failure of a low-cost subsidiary would play a large part in determining the legacy of both Dixon and the chief financial officer Peter Gregg, a key architect of Qantas' overarching strategy. It had been a stellar rise for a young man raised in the working-class suburb of Tallaght, in south-west Dublin. Aer Lingus eventually dropped its plans to set up a budget offshoot, instead reshaping its entire operations as a low-cost airline. The maths whiz from Dublin had all the route numbers in his head, and knew where Ansett made and lost its money. But Ansett was a failing business. After Air New Zealand gained outright control in early 2000, many of its managers - including Joyce - became increasingly sidelined as the parent stamped its mark. For Qantas, the flood of departures from Ansett gave it a chance to cherry-pick executives without having to pay above the odds(over the odds UK informal more than something is really worth: It's a nice enough car but I'm sure she paid over the odds for it. pay over the odds (British & Australian) to pay more for something than it is really worth (often + for ) ). Eddington, the Perth-born Rhodes scholar, had left Ansett months earlier to become British Airways' chief executive. Despite the challenges of his new role in London, Eddington found himself helping out his former colleagues at Ansett who were leaving the airline in droves. Eddington phoned Dixon to tell him that whatever he did he should hire Joyce, a talented young executive who was still at Ansett. Dixon took his advice and interviewed Joyce, offering him a job. The day he informed his bosses at Ansett he was going to work for its rival, he was told to leave, and escorted from its head office. By 2001 he was ensconced (ensconce [ɪnˈskons] if you ensconce yourself or if you are ensconced somewhere, you put yourself into a comfortable or safe position.) in a new role in Sydney as the general manager of Qantas' network. Less than three years later, Ansett was a distant memory遥远的记忆 as Joyce steered a secret project to set up a budget airline for Qantas. After gaining financial approval from the Qantas board in October 2003, the project team shifted to an office in North Sydney and began recruiting extra staff. Their plans for what was known internally as the Qantas low-cost carrier were kept under tight wraps. Despite Qantas buying Impulse in 2001, a final decision was yet to be made about whether the shell of its operations would form the basis of a new budget airline. Instead, Impulse's fleet of Boeing 717 planes had been repainted in Qantas livery and flown on domestic routes. The project team worked to a tight schedule. Qantas was desperate for a weapon to attack Virgin Blue. The Qantas executives knew the industry was on the cusp of a surge井喷之势(on the cusp [kʌsp] 临界点 someone who was born on the cusp was born around the 21st of a month, when one sign of the zodiac ends and the next begins. She was born on the cusp of Scorpio and Sagittarius.) in demand from leisure travellers: an annual holiday to far-flung destinations was becoming a ritual for many people. In drawing up the business case, the executives looked overseas to learn lessons from other airlines such as British Airways. Within three months of Joyce's appointment, Qantas revealed plans to launch a low-cost domestic airline by May 2004. The pressure was on to create a new airline in a matter of months. The overarching strategy was to trap Virgin in a pincer movement两面夹击( 两面包抄. The pincer movement, or double envelopment, is a military maneuver in which forces simultaneously attack both flanks (sides) of an enemy formation. The name comes from visualizing the action as the split attacking forces "pinching" the enemy.). The new budget airline would be run more cheaply than Virgin, while Qantas would boast superior products and services. The company would have both ends of the market covered, and Virgin would be stuck in the middle in no man's land. The project team and marketing experts had spent weeks deliberating over a range of names for the new airline, including Jetone, Jetblack and JetX. Consumer research had told Joyce and the rest of his team that "jet" was a positive word to use in the name of an airline. In the end, they walked into Dixon's office to recommend Qantas adopt JetX as the name for the new airline. "It sounds like a petrol station," Dixon retorted. Marketing was Dixon's forte([ˈfɔ:(r)teɪ] [fɔ:(r)t]). He had been responsible for building Qantas' brand in the 1990s. In his office sat model planes sporting the Southern Cross constellation. Turning to them, Dixon said: "Why don't you call it Jetstar?" Dixon had joined the dots. From the outset, Dixon took a close interest in the plans for the new offshoot, knowing it would become a central part of Qantas in the years to come. With Joyce ensconced as the chief executive of the new low-cost airline, in October 2003 Dixon entrusted John Borghetti with the premium brand and its 16,000 staff and fleet of more than 200 planes. Borghetti was obsessed with the finer details and believed in the importance of branding to the extent that he saw himself as a virtual walking billboard活广告牌. The Qantas brand was upmost 最重要的 in his mind. Overseeing both Qantas' core domestic and international operations, Borghetti set about investing heavily in its brand and product. The split ensured that frictions 摩擦 began to develop between the red tails of Qantas under Borghetti and the orange tails of Jetstar under Joyce. From the outset, Borghetti had made clear that he favoured a budget airline capped at 10 planes, and did not want to see Qantas replaced by Jetstar on routes such as those to the Gold Coast. The Jetstar team saw themselves as offering the company a future, and their counterparts at Qantas as dinosaurs who were trying to hold onto old ways of thinking. The siege mentality at Jetstar was necessary to get it running, and stem the company's loss of market share in the leisure-travel market to Virgin Blue, which was expanding aggressively. But it created clear battlelines within the company, setting the scene for dust-ups(a fight, usually a short one.) over its overarching direction. In early December 2003, Dixon, Joyce and Gregg strode before TV cameras to detail their plans for a new airline to be badged Jetstar. "If we are going to be cannibalised, we might as well cannibalise ourselves," Dixon declared, vowing that Jetstar would be cheaper to run than Virgin. It would be based in Melbourne, away from the head office of its parent in Sydney, and fly a fleet of ageing Boeing 717s before it took delivery of 177-seat Airbus A320 aircraft over the next few years. In the following months, Jetstar dangled the carrot of ( to dangle a carrot in front of someone. ) $29 one-way fares to entice passengers and spent $15 million on a marketing campaign featuring Melbourne comic Magda Szubanski. Jetstar's focus was on keeping a tight rein on costs. This meant it rolled out online check-in and did not allocate seats to passengers, so that planes could be loaded and unloaded more quickly. The airline flew to airports such as Avalon in Victoria, which had lower charges and used stairs to planes rather than more expensive aerobridges. The Impulse pilots who had been flying Boeing 717 aircraft accepted a deal to fly Jetstar A320s for the same salary, which was significantly less than what their counterparts at Qantas earned. For Qantas unions, the new airline was an attempt to eat away at 蚕食 their hard-won wages and conditions. Jetstar became Qantas's attack dog on Virgin Blue. The question was how big Qantas would allow it to grow, and whether it would eat away at its parent's underbelly. Grounded: How Alan Joyce brought Qantas and the nation to a standstill: Shortly before 5pm, Alan Joyce took a lift with one of his minders 保镖
down six floors at Qantas headquarters near Sydney Airport. Once out of
the lift, they began the short stroll to where journalists and cameras
had been corralled ( corral [kəˈrɑ:l] 赶在一起. 聚在一起. to move horses, cows etc into a corral. ) for a hastily arranged media conference to hear an announcement they had only been told was big. Before the Qantas chief executive got to the waiting journalists, a text message was sent to Lyell Strambi's mobile. "We are go," it read. With those words, the die had been cast. There would be no turning back. About 10 minutes earlier, in anticipation, Strambi, the Qantas head of operations, had set up a conference call with his direct reports. Some of Strambi's executives had written short scripts beforehand to read out to their own managers when the nod was given. With Strambi on one line, his confidants (confidant[ˈkonfɪdænt] someone who you trust and can discuss your secrets and private feelings with. ) were about to dial into their own conference calls to feed the message down the line. "Alan is going in now. He's made the decision. You now need to go and put in place your plans开始实施," one told his direct reports. As the words ricocheted ( ricochet [ˈrɪkəʃeɪ] 回响 if a moving object ricochets, it hits a surface at an angle and immediately moves away from it at a different angle. ricochet off: The ball ricocheted off a rock and hit him on the shoulder.) around the organisation, emails began appearing in the inboxes
of senior staff outlining what was about to happen and what they needed
to do. With the push of a "send" button on a mobile phone, the middle
managers had been drawn into the vortex(vortex [ˈvɔ:(r)teks] 漩涡 I. formal a powerful spinning current of air or water that pulls everything down inside it. II. literary a feeling or situation that has so much power or influence over you that you feel you are not in control. vortex of: caught up in a swirling vortex of emotions.). The chief executive was holding a media conference and in 10 minutes all hell would break loose. Earlier, on the last Saturday in October 2011, some staff not yet in the know had turned up at Qantas headquarters and at airport terminals in jeans and T-shirts. They had no idea why they had been dragged into the office on a Saturday. For all they knew, the Transport Workers Union was about to launch a strike. Standing in front of TV cameras, Joyce started reading a prepared speech. "A crisis is unfolding in Qantas," he began. With the unions "trashing our strategy and our brand", Joyce insisted he had no option but to force the issue ( Compel the making of an immediate decision. to make it necessary for someone to make a decision immediately. ) by locking out staff
who were covered by three agreements under negotiation. "Killing Qantas
slowly would be a tragedy for Qantas and our employees," he said. It
would be 55 sentences into his carefully crafted 字斟句酌的 speech before he uttered the crucial lines. "The lockout makes it necessary for us to ground the fleet,"
he declared. "We have decided to ground the Qantas international and
domestic fleets immediately. I repeat, we are grounding the Qantas fleet
now." Within eight minutes of the start of Joyce's speech, the command
to ground the fleet had worked its way to every part 传遍 of the Qantas operations, from London and Los Angeles to Darwin, Sydney and Perth. Joyce's decision would disrupt 98,000 passengers already sitting on Qantas planes or who were due to hop on its services over the next few days. Shocked staff went out into the airports and terminals and did what they had been told. Few read the list of prepared notes detailing what they should do. Time was precious. Staff ensured that passengers disembarked from planes and were sent home or put-up in hotels. In a worst-case scenario, Qantas had expected arguments and fights to start. Travel plans would be thrown into disarray. But mayhem did not break out. Instead staff and passengers appeared so stunned and disbelieving of what was occurring that an air of order was maintained
in airport terminals around the country and overseas. People were
simply dumbfounded. At 5:15pm Qantas gave formal orders to couriers to
deliver to staff lockout notices. Five minutes later, Qantas phoned a
broker to book 2000 hotel rooms in Los Angeles and 800 in Singapore.
Shortly afterwards the airline booked accommodation in Australia for
stranded passengers. Qantas still had 66 planes in the air. The airline
decided not to tell pilots who were flying about the unprecedented
events underway on the ground. It deemed it a risk to safety because it believed pilots would be distracted while in the air. Word had a habit of spreading quickly,
even at 40,000 feet. Pilots on long-haul flights often tuned into ABC
Radio Australia or spoke to pilots of other aircraft via air-to-air
communications. The captain of a 747 flying from Dallas to Brisbane, one
of the longest runs in the he world, was listening to the news on Radio
Australia in the middle of the night when he heard that his airline had
been grounded. Steve Anderson, the captain of the 747 who was also a
secretary of the pilots' union, checked in with Qantas' operations control centre in Sydney but was told they had no information to relay to him. This was despite the fact that Qantas had prepared a statement to be read to any pilots who phoned in. The statement confirmed Qantas had been grounded but emphasised that it did not pose a safety risk to their flight.
They were told to fly on to their destination where they would be met
on arrival and all would be explained. Earlier in the afternoon, Anthony
Albanese has been playing tennis in a social competition at
Marrickville in Sydney's inner west. In the middle of the game the
federal transport minister got a call at 1:38pm from one of his advisers
to say that the Qantas chief executive wanted to speak to him urgently, and to expect a call等一个电话. The call didn't come. He rang Joyce's mobile at 1:51pm but couldn't get through. "What a time to ring!" Albanese said sternly in a message
he left on Joyce's phone. Four minutes later, Albanese tried again,
without any luck. Finally, his mobile rang with Joyce on the other end
of the line shortly after 2pm. The Qantas chief executive told him that
he would be grounding Australia's largest airline in less than three
hours and locking out staff on the following Monday. Albanese told him unequivocally( unequivocal [ˌʌnɪˈkwɪvək(ə)l] clear, definite, and without doubt. their unequivocal commitment to public education. )
that he thought it was a bad decision. "I reminded him that CHOGM was
on in Perth and that if he's going to pick any time to ground the
airline, ever, that it would do maximum damage. I said "Why would you do it tonight? People would be stranded. If you are going to do this, why wouldn't you at least give me some notice?" Albanese recalled later. "He was like, the decision has been made. We were being told, not asked." Working to a prepared script, Joyce told Albanese he was doing it on the basis of safety. He informed the minister that if word leaked 消息传出去, he would ground the fleet immediately. The government believed Qantas had dumped the problem in its lap to be fixed. Albanese phoned the Treasurer, Wayne Swan, who organised a telephone hook up of key cabinet ministers to determine a course of action行动方针.
This was a crisis for the government, too. Before the teleconference,
Albanese spoke briefly to Prime Minister Julia Gillard about the
government's course of action. As a former industrial relations minster
and the architect of the Fair Work Act, Gillard knew the legislation back to front. It was quickly decided 很快决定 to send the dispute to an emergency hearing of the industrial umpire by using Section 424 of the Fair Work Act. To Qantas' dismay, the government had decided against invoking Section 431 of the industrial relations laws, which gave ministers the powers to terminate the dispute immediately. It would have allowed Qantas to keep flying. The government decided Albanese would lead its counterattack later that afternoon. After being given an ultimatum by Qantas, the government believed it needed to get on the front foot( In a dominant position. at an advantage, outclassing and outmanoeuvring one's opponents. Chelsea saw out the half firmly on the front foot and had three further chances to take the lead. on the back foot (idiomatic) In a defensive posture; off-balance.) or the airline, the opposition and the unions would quickly fill the vacuum填补真空. Later, while Joyce was still speaking at his press conference, Albanese's media minder alerted journalists to a media conference
to be held with the transport minster in central Sydney, not far from
Qantas' city offices. Clearly angry, Albanese said he was "very
concerned about Qantas' actions of which we were notified only
mid-afternoon". In the 1989 pilots strike, the government was able to make contingency plans 应急计划. It had called in the Royal Australian Air Force and allowed international airlines to fly on domestic routes. This time there was no warning. Australia depended on aviation like almost no other country. Albanese told journalists the government would be making an urgent application to Fair Work to terminate all industrial action at Qantas. The government accused the Coalition of knowing about the planned grounding and acting in unison with 一个鼻孔出气, 沆瀣一气, 一丘之貉, 穿一条裤子 ( unison [ˈju:nɪs(ə)n] a section of music where the singers or players all perform the same note or notes that are an octave apart. in unison I. together, or at the same time. The audience were clapping and stamping in unison. in agreement. The committee members are in complete unison on this.) Qantas. Their claims gained credibility when the shadow treasurer, Joe Hockey, told the ABC's 7.30 Report that Qantas had been saying "weeks ago" that it was considering a grounding or lockout as an option. A day later, Hockey changed his position改变说法. Joyce had made the biggest gamble of his career. The fact that word of the grounding had not leaked testified to the loyalty of his inner circle( testify I. 证明了 to provide evidence that something exists or is true. testify to: These ruins testify to the existence of Roman occupation. II. 作证. 证实. to make a statement about something that you saw, know, or experienced, usually in a court of law. testify (that): Three people testified that they heard gunshots. testify for/against someone: Several key witnesses have agreed to testify against Edwards. ). But neither he nor his inner sanctum knew whether the months of planning and strategising would pay off. With a single decision the man with the thick Irish brogue from Dublin's outer suburbs had almost stopped a nation. After months of unions threatening stoppages, calling them off at the last minute, and in some cases seeing them through, it was Qantas that was taking action. Throughout 全程, 自始至终, Joyce had not shown signs of anxiety or nervousness to his staff. He was cool under pressure. The question now was whether his extraordinary act would bring the dispute to an abrupt end. More importantly, once the dust settled what would be the final toll?
