I am traveling for work today.  I feel fortunate and grateful to be able to … if a bit cautious under the circumstances.

I pass through Newark airport, operations Mecca.  Or not.  Or sort of.

If you’ve been through here anytime in the last ten years, it’s certainly had its ups and downs.

I was chatting with a fellow traveler post security.  We agreed the security line process is “almost good.”  It’s about 1000% better than when we had the big ramp in the TSA’s early days.  

But it’s still a classic operations bottleneck.  The luggage flow is choppy.  Getting your stuff into the baggage trays is anarchic.  It stops and starts.  There’s excess work-in-process (people + bags).

In fairness, this might be as good as it gets without a major (and expensive) do-over.  It handles a LOT of passengers and bags with reasonable efficiency, even if it’s not exactly a delightful experience.

Early today I had two customer service mini-clashes.  I was right in both cases, I promise.  But both times, I had to ask for an escalation to a manager to get my issue solved.  I was struck that perhaps these companies, a very large one and a small one, had just trained their reps to say NO to everything.  This is Definitely Bad, not Almost Good.

Running businesses, sales, operations, being the CEO of yourself, your life and being in the world, it’s worth asking when Almost Good is good enough, or could be improved.  Is the effort worth it?  It’s also worth recognizing Definitely Bad things and fixing them.  And if the Definitely Bad things are consequent to a conscious policy or program, stop.

One of the managers I spoke to today was called Mitch.  He was great, but I sensed he was the caretaker of a collapsing process.  He told me he’d give the team “some additional coaching,” hopefully prevent the mistake I had called to fix.  I really appreciated that.

Postscript: after publicly admonishing myself yesterday to remain calm and focused when “things take as long as they take,”  I had three moments today wrestling with boring-but-important admin stuff.  I least I remembered that I’m trying.  It seems like I may need some additional coaching too.

-Chris