Becoming a Director Taught Me That Politics Isn't Always a Dirty Word

When people talk about office politics, they usually mean it in a derogatory, negative way, and I thought the same when I became Commercial Director of Airtours, but I quickly discovered that politics inside a fast-growing business isn't necessarily about protecting your own position. Often it is simply the process of getting a group of strong personalities with completely different responsibilities to agree on how much risk the business should take.

At the same time as my promotion to Commercial Director, Paul Evans became Purchasing Director and Richard Carrick Marketing Director, creating a new Airtours board underneath Group Managing Director Hugh Collinson. Anita McLean subsequently joined as Operations Director and Chris Mottershead became Finance Director following the Aspro acquisition. Suddenly we weren't simply running departments; collectively we were making decisions that could materially affect the profitability of the entire Group.

One of the biggest opportunities came from Mike Lee, the MD of in-house airline Airtours International, who Paul and I always got on well with. Mike understood that our rapidly expanding airline needed a winter flying programme to counterbalance the enormous summer European beach operation.

Florida already provided year-round flying, but we needed more long-haul winter destinations, so Paul was dispatched around Jamaica, Barbados and Antigua trying to secure hotel beds for a new Caribbean programme.

The problem was that everybody else wanted those beds as well.

Winter was peak season in the Caribbean for Canadian and US customers, and good quality hotel capacity was limited, yet slowing the airline's growth wasn't something David Crossland particularly fancied.

We therefore did something that would probably give today's risk committees a nervous breakdown. We launched the programme knowing we didn't have enough contracted hotel beds for all the aircraft seats we intended to operate, trusting that additional capacity would become available later.

David approved it because he understood the bigger commercial equation. Airtours International wasn't simply another supplier to the tour operator; the airline was becoming one of the major engines driving Group profitability.

Paul Evans had an even stronger personality than I did, and regularly joked that it didn't really matter what Richard Carrick, the Marketing Director, thought because if Paul wanted to screw up a destination he could simply buy it badly, while I could achieve the same result by pricing it badly. Therefore, according to Paul, we held the real power on the board.

He had a point.

Airtours in those days was entrepreneurial, instinctive and remarkably willing to take calculated risks. I remember Paul bursting into my office one day asking, "What do you think about Cuba?"

"Not a lot. Sex, drugs, guns and communists?"

"Exactly. It'll sell like hot cakes."

And that was pretty much the market research.

Cuba fitted naturally behind our expanding Caribbean programme; the prices were attractive and, most importantly, we understood our customers. Many decisions contained plenty of commercial logic, but we certainly weren't commissioning six-month consultancy studies before making them. We relied heavily on gut feel, buying power and an instinctive understanding of what the Airtours value-for-money customer would buy.

David Crossland sat at the centre of all this and operated almost like an octopus, constantly sucking information from everybody around him before eventually making what I used to think of as one of his Yoda-like decisions.

What I didn't fully appreciate then was how cleverly the personalities around him balanced each other. Harry Coe controlled the City and financial levers while Hugh Collinson managed day-to-day operations. Within the tour operation, Paul and I were probably the wild ones, so people such as Chris Mottershead and Andrew Clemance provided financial and operational restraint, while Richard added what I rather disrespectfully called the "AFBM", or "Airy Fairy Bollocky Marketing".

At the time I sometimes regarded those people as obstacles that needed navigating around. With age, I've realised they were actually part of the reason Airtours worked.

Entrepreneurial businesses need people prepared to push boundaries, but they also need people strong enough to challenge them. Good management politics isn't about winning every argument; it's about creating enough tension between competing opinions to stop any one personality taking the business over a cliff.

We didn't always agree, and we certainly weren't always polite about it, but looking back, we had an exceptional collection of people.

The subsequent growth of Airtours suggests the politics worked.