Accepting mistakes when they are made and taking responsibility for a grand mess-up by doing the decent thing seems to be a shrinking virtue.
How a man who was paid £1.5 million last year, including £871,000 in bonuses, believes he should stay in his lucrative position after presiding over a catastrophic meltdown that affected hundreds of thousands of people and cost businesses millions, especially after he promised it would never happen again after a previous incident, speaks volumes about arrogance.
The boss of the National Air Control authority (NATS), whose four-hour failure of its flight data system at its HQ left more than 2,000 flights cancelled and the 330,000 passengers sleeping on airport floors, missing work and booking new flights at their own expense just three years after a similar episode, remains in his comfy desk chair.
The buck stops at CEO Martin Rolphe - but his insistence on staying put as airlines lose millions of pounds each in revenue with more to come in compensation from passengers, smacks of the archetypal fat cat who grabs the money without accountability.
Who cares about the little people scratching around for enough money to get themselves home to their jobs and zero hours’ contracts?
Or the airlines that face paying their compensation?
His nest is well-feathered.
Worse still, he is exposed as a man whose word cannot be trusted.
He promised an outage like this would never happen again after the 2023 meltdown that stranded more than 700,000 passengers, some for up to a week, on August bank holiday, costing airlines between £75 million and £100 million.
Another smaller IT meltdown in July last year caused flights to be grounded at major airports.
Yet, the consequences of his organisation’s failure are borne by passengers, airlines, airports and businesses while, so far, he gets off scot free.
Ryanair is already suing NATS for more than £7 million for its 2023 outage.
The Financial Times estimates that its 260 cancelled flights on the first day this week, affecting about 65,000 customers, represented about £2.6 million of Ryanair revenue at risk.
Even the transport secretary says she doesn’t believe the latest disruption was unavoidable yet still he clings to his desk.
Do these A type personalities believe nothing is their fault and they are simply too important to take the blame?
A substantial proportion of his remuneration is supposed to reflect performance.
If an executive can earn hundreds of thousands of pounds in bonuses for delivering performance, why shouldn't they lose some of that money when performance demonstrably falls short?
If he accepts £1.5 million-a-year remuneration, he should accept £1.5 million-a-year accountability.
After the 2023 failure, Rolfe reportedly assured stakeholders that the resilience of the system would be improved so that a failure of the primary system would not produce the same consequences again.
Ryanair is now explicitly citing that assurance in calling for his removal.
CEOs – think water companies – appear to increasingly have slopey shoulders.
But their responsibilities are clear - that critical infrastructure is resilient, there are effective back-up systems, lessons from previous failures are implemented, investment is directed towards reliability, risks are properly identified and mitigated, and the organisation can recover rapidly when something does go wrong.
These high-value high-impact crises seem to wash over him as occupational hiccups rather than monumental systemic failures.
Failure shouldn't merely mean you don't get this year's bonus.
Reports say Rolfe's contract does contain a mechanism allowing bonuses to be clawed back following serious incidents, but it hasn't been used.
Like so many other cases, it feels like the man believes he is bigger than the job.
He’s had his chances, made his promises yet resilience and any backup system haven’t been effective, at a massive cost to others, so the consequence should be obvious.
The perfect antidote to a man who takes himself far too seriously is the couple that restored my faith in the decency and positivity of the human spirit.
Jamie and Michelle Wade are the embodiment of making the best out of a bad job, handling what too many people would label a disaster with grace and humour and are clearly a couple who share the right priorities in life.
There are not many brides and grooms who would laugh, kiss and get on with celebrating their wedding after plunging into the river in all their wedding finery while precariously trying to balance on a canoe for a photograph.
No tantrums, strops or anguished shrieks of “everything is ruined” as they clung on sopping wet.
Drenched through, hair plastered to their head and makeup running, there was no bridezilla strop.
Amid the laughter Michelle simply asked her new husband for a kiss as they clung on to the side of a canoe in stitches at their predicament.
Childhood sweethearts who lost touch until bumping into each other in a supermarket car park after 30-odd years, Michelle told ITV GMB viewers that she had waited 30 years so she wasn’t going to let any amount of dousing ruin the day.
If a sense of humour is the secret to a happy marriage, they have made it.
How refreshing in a world of picture-perfect Instagram weddings, styled and staged to the last sequin; to see a couple face what life throws at them with laughter, and embrace misfortune as part of the rich tapestry of life.
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