Who is the Next Air Canada CEO?
It was a hot topic at the recent IATA Annual General Meeting.
Dear readers,
If you were following news reports from the IATA Annual General Meeting, you’d think executives spent hours in Rio de Janeiro discussing rising fuel prices, the war in Iran, future mergers and acquisitions, and supply chain woes.1 That stuff matters, but let me assure you: these serious conversations are a tiny part of what happens at this meeting every year. So what does happen?
Well, there’s the serious and sober part, when executives engage — often in dreary, windowless rooms at a convention center — with partners and potential partners about alliances, codeshares, interline agreements, and frequent flyer tie-ups. Then, at night, many executives enjoy happy hours and boozy dinners,2 perhaps with former colleagues or maybe with leaders from their airline’s closest joint venture and codeshare partners.
Sadly, airlines never invite me to those bilateral meetings (I hear they can be quite boring), and a carrier only once invited me to a boozy dinner, though just for dessert. But I do participate in what many consider to be the best part of the AGM: the gossip, when executives freely share industry chatter as if they’re characters from “Mean Girls.” The fodder is what you would expect: job openings, people they don’t like, and competitor executives they view as incompetent.3
I’m not going to betray what I learned in off-the-record discussions, but there is a topic that executives will discuss with me “on background” (that’s what you say to me when you’re telling me something I can use so long as it can’t be traced to you). They love to chat about big open jobs — specifically, who is going to get them.4
This year, the favorite topic was: who will replace Robert Isom and when?5 I’ll cover that soon, but since we think Isom has time, I’ll focus on a more urgent personnel matter: who will lead Air Canada no later than Sept. 30 after Mike Rousseau, who does not speak French, retires. Here’s what I heard in Rio about Rousseau’s likely successors.