When Pierre Jeanniot arrived to head IATA, he had planned to stay for five years. In fact, by the time he departs as director general next year, he will have overseen a decade of change, both at IATA and the industry at large. Along the way, and including his time leading Air Canada, Jeanniot has consistently championed a more commercial and consumer-driven path for the industry.
The collection of honours on the wall of his office at IATA Centre testifies to the breadth of Jeanniot's experience. They range from an honourary doctorate from the University of Quebec, where he is Chancellor, through to the Independence Medal awarded by the late King Hussein of Jordan in 1995. Next to those certificates hang the Order of Canada, presented in 1989, and the Chevalier dans L'Ordre de la Legion d'Honneur, bestowed upon him by the French Government two years later. Despite his Canadian heritage, Jeanniot was actually born in Montpellier, France, in 1933. His parents crossed the Atlantic in 1946.
Jeanniot's career at Air Canada began in the 1950s and stretched over the next 35 years. By his own admission, Jeanniot says that he worked in virtually every part of the airline, from technical, to sales. By 1984 he had become president and chief executive. When a conservative government came to power in the late 1980s the time was right to see through privatisation. "They said that if I could make the company privatisable, then they would privatise it," says Jeanniot. Having helped to restore the airline's finances, the high-profile sell-off took place in 1988 with him at the helm.
Only two years later Jeanniot left the airline. After the best part of a decade in charge, he confesses that an argument with the board over future strategy proved simply too much. "I shut the door and left them to run the company," he says. "I was really bushed at the time and I decided to take a year's sabbatical and relax." He even set up a small one-man consultancy, which is when he received a call from Bombardier chairman Laurent Beaudoin to do some private consulting. The Canadian aerospace group had the "crazy" idea of stretching its Canadair business jet into a regional aircraft. "I was asked to crawl through the aircraft and criticise it from the point of view of the operator," says Jeanniot, adding that he started out on the engineering side of the business, with his first 13 years at Air Canada spent on the technical side.
That programme, of course, went on to launch the new breed of regional jets. As a momento Jeanniot has a scale model of the original Canadair 50-seater with his initials, C-PJJ, as the registration.
Jeanniot was soon lined up to take the top post at IATA and was officially due to join at the start of 1993. However, all was not well at the Geneva headquarters. At the time, leadership was split, with the director general acting as figurehead and a managing director retaining tight control of operations. In fact, the latter was under investigation for taking kickbacks and by mid-1992 Jeanniot received a "panic call" to come in immediately. He agreed, on the understanding that he could take a role in the internal audit then taking place.
An immediate change was to dispense with the role of managing director and hand responsibility down to the heads of the divisions. He also launched an airline-style customer service programme. At Air Canada it had taken 18 months to put all 22,000 staff through a similar "success together" plan and at IATA there was a need too to "break down the silos". Of the 80 or so senior managers around the world, some simply had never met.
He also took up the ongoing effort to streamline and restructure the organisation, with parts of the business brought in-house, in particular the lucrative billing and settlement plan (BSP) services for the world travel industry. IATA was responsible for such services but they were often run at arm's length by other partners.
The net commercial result is that IATA has moved from a budget of $55 million when Jeanniot first arrived, to become an "international co-operative" turning over $300 million. Two-thirds of that comes from the BSPs, with the remainder from a range of consultancy work and services. Less than $18 million is from membership dues, compared with over $25 million a decade ago, he adds.
The search for a new director general continues, after a successor dropped out earlier this year. Jeanniot says that he will go at the end of next year. He aims to devote more time to other activities, such as Quebec University and the Scotia Bank on whose boards he has long sat. He even ponders reviving his consultancy. "I don't see myself being totally unoccupied," he says with a smile.
Source: Airline Business