to create a market niche. Carlzon chose the business traveler,
because he believed that this was the most profitable niche—
rather than college students, or travel agent deals, or any of the
other choices. In order to attract business travelers, Carlzon
had to make their every interaction with every SAS employee
rewarding. He had to endow with purpose and relevance, cour-
tesy and caring, every single interaction—and he estimated that
there were 63,000 of these interactions per day between SAS
employees and current or potential customers. He called these
interactions “moments of truth.”
Carlzon developed a marvelous cartoon book, The Little Red
Book, to communicate the new SAS vision to employees. And
he set up a corporate college in Copenhagen to train them. On
top of that, he de-bureaucratized the whole organization. The
organization chart no longer looks like a pyramid—it looks like
a set of circles, a galaxy. In fact, Carlzon’s book, which is called
Moments of Truthin English, is titled Destroying the Pyramids in
its original Swedish.
One of those circles, one organizational segment, is the
Copenhagen–New York route. All the pilots, the navigators,
the engineers, the flight attendants, the baggage handlers, the
reservations agents—everybody who has to do with the Copen-
hagen–New York route—are involved in a self-managed, au-
tonomous work group with a gain-sharing plan so that they all
participate in whatever increment of profits that particular
route brings in. There’s also a Copenhagen–Frankfurt organi-
zational segment. The whole corporation is structured in terms
of these small, egalitarian groups.
Former General Electric CEO Jack Welch said, “Yesterday’s
idea of the boss, who became the boss because he or she knew
one more fact than the person working for them, is yesterday’s
Forging the Future