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“If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.”  
General Eric Shinseki, Chief of Staff, U.S. Army as quoted by Tom Peters in Reimagine

I only flew JAL once and that was on 5 August 1972 London to Rome with That Man Strodel.

We flew First Class (probably only cost about £10 in those days @ 90%), got comprehensively ripped and spent the next three days looking for the Senso Unico.

We thought it must have been something like the Vatican or the Coliseum.

“Pretty important place” we though “what with all those signs”

(They broke it to us very gently)

I visited their corporate HQ sometime in the 1980s on a benchmarking exercise for a cargo IT project.

We thought they’d be red-hot, given that Japan made the best cars/radios/TVs/consumer electronics…..

It was like the Dark Ages.

They had a whole MINEFIELD of incompatible systems that didn’t talk to each other,  MILLIONS of people filling out forms that substituted (sort of..) for efficient data interchange and a blissful lake of awareness that there were perhaps other ways of doing things.

I guess things can’t have changed that much…