Cessna's corporate blind spot: "Who, me worry?"

Cessna simply does not get it.

That the public and the media pilloried CEO’s of Detroit’s Big Three automakers for flying hugely expensive corporate jets to DC so that they could personally beg Congress for billions of taxpayer dollars was less about the private aviation and more about executive judgment.

When the nation, and indeed the world, is experiencing the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression 70 years ago, and the auto companies are losing tens of millions of dollars daily, fiscal excess in any form is the last thing they should exhibit to stakeholders.

Yet Cessna’s “Rise” ad and PR campaign debuted in The Wall Street Journal and other business and trade publications this week. And the “Rise” challenge to executives plays not to their fiscal prudence and thoughtful and prescient management, but to unvarnished ego and raw machismo.

One segment of the Cessna ad reads: "One thing is certain: True visionaries will continue to fly. Because in tempestuous times, leaders recognize it's not about ego. Or artifice. It's simply about availing yourself of the full range of tools to do your job.”

By denouncing ego, Cessna is in fact catering to it, just through the back door.

"Timidity didn't get you this far,” the Cessna ad states. “Why put it in your business plan now? In today's corporate world, pity the executive who blinks."

Explaining why he approved the campaign’s lead ad, Cessna CEO and president Jack Pelton told Ad Age, "It's time for the other side of the story to be told" referring to the denunciation the Big Three got for their beggars’ fly-in.

And corporate communication VP Robert Stangarone so eloquently supported his boss saying, "We have a big dog in this fight. We feel like we must take a stand."

No one at Cessna, or their ad agency, seems to understand. Wise use of private aviation by corporations is widely accepted as good business and financial policy, when done properly:

• When executives regularly visit multiple clients in geographically dispersed areas over short periods of time; 
  
• When a corporate shuttle is a more cost efficient way to move employees regularly among multiple facilities than high cost, last minute commercial tickets;
  
• When CEO safety is a concern.
  

Lots of valid reasons justifying private aviation can be made, but Cessna did not make them. Therefore, we must conclude that Cessna did not make a valid case because it does not understand the practical business and public relations issues at hand.

It was much easier for Cessna to reach for the corporate jugular, and challenge CEOs with the implied question of what sort of weak-kneed, indecisive sissy executive are your to give up your magic carpet of privilege!

This insensitivity to stakeholder reaction — a not unjustified reaction — is the kind of behavior that diminishes public confidence in “big business” and leads to public outcry for increased regulation. Too bad Cessna is only adding fuel to the fire.

[Read the full Cessna campaign story in the Ad Age online edition.]