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| Friday, 20 February 2004 |
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Footprints in the Sand In his effort to build Asia's top on-line travel agency, Scott Blume professes a very 'un-dotcom' management style, stressing realistic goals and accountability to investors. Conservative isn't how you'd expect the CEO of a Web-based travel start-up to describe himself. Especially when that service calls itself an "on-line travel guru" and uses such unorthodox marketing tactics as towing a sandy "Paradise Island" around to get its message out. But that's precisely the way Zuji.com CEO Scott Blume views his management style. Blume, 44, who says he's a "reformed chartered accountant thrust into the dark side of sales and marketing," brings a no-nonsense approach to steering his lean management team. The aim? To make Zuji.com, a joint venture between 16 Asia-Pacific airlines and United States-based on-line ticketing giant Travelocity, the region's first stop for on-line travel booking. "You have to have confidence in the team, you put in place so that you can bring it together quickly, thrash the decisions out and get on with it," Blume says. To be sure, Zuji - which means "footprint" in Chinese - has a long way to go. Despite launching more than a year ago and a series of marketing campaigns (besides the island, Zuji conducted a major taxi-ad campaign last year in Singapore to raise brand awareness), Blume still considers it a start-up. In large part, that's because of his conservative management style. Blume has concentrated on getting the basics right before moving to the next level. "My philosophy throughout my career has been to minimise bureaucracy and maximise accountability," he says. One of the ways to facilitate that is with the Monday morning "stand-up," as Blume calls it. It's nothing more complicated than a weekly staff meeting where all are encouraged to speak their minds in the interest of "crashing through the roadblocks. "In the fast-paced world of e-commerce, companies need to move quickly to stay ahead of the curve, Blume says, but the rules of the game have also changed since the heady days of the dotcom boom. Businesses have to be more realistic about their goals and their obligations to investors. "I think there is more accountability than arguably there has been in the past," he says. Blume, an Australian who cut his managerial teeth at such established institutions as Deloitte, finds the roll-up-your-sleeves atmosphere of a dotcom more challenging. "You probably make more mistakes than you would in a normal bricks-and-mortar environment where you know the business rules. But provides you learn from those mistakes, that's fine," Blume says. He admits to at least one error and an important revelation about working in Asia: The mistake was the premature launching of Zuji's hotel product before all the kinks were worked out. Customers let him know. Now, the company has revamped the service and is planning to re-launch it in February. The revelation? One size doesn't fit all, especially in a place as culturally diverse as Asia. A good example was Zuji.com's experience with its Taiwanese customers. The on-line travel portal runs a hotline so that, if customers want to, they can come back with questions or comments. When Blume and his team noticed an unusual number of calls from Taiwan, they decided to investigate. "It turned out that in Taiwan it was common business practice to at least call the customer once to ask, "Did you get your tickets?," Blume says. Since then, that's just what Zuji has done. Courtesy: Far Easter Economic Review |
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