Professor Elam

In his Quality Points Dr. Deming tells us that consumers do not complain, they switch. Hmm, maybe not all the time Dr.  Check out this story on how passengers refused to disembark from an airplane when the flight was cancelled.

In fact they stayed on the plane throughout the night, a sit in reminiscent of the 1960s on American college campuses if you will.

Okay, guess where this happened? And on what airline-surely in the US where protests are common or perhaps say France which always goes its own Gallic way, right?  Nope, how about on a Chinese airline among Chinese citizens!  Gee I thought this was a Communist country where one dared not defy authority?  Perhaps the increased press coverage prior to this summer olympics has something to do with emboldening passengers. But perhaps we are just seeing a global shift to a consumer driven economy.  People are tired in every country of indiscriminate cancellation of flights. So here it is – another  reason China is scrambling to build so much infrastructure in their country!  Communist leaders are well aware that the citizens know how the rest of the world lives. The failure to provide services and infrastructure could start with  a quiet protest like this.  But if it spreads to the billion residing in China, even the Chinese Army will not be able to stop it.  So, we have Communists, as Jim Rogers says in Adventure Capitalist, acting like capitalists.  They certainly saw what happened to Gorbachev in Russia and Calcesceau in Romania-he and his wife were shot dead by firing squad, without a trial.

My piont-ponder what this means for totalitarian governments all over the globe. Not to mention companies that fail to respond to consumer shifts in behavior.