Why Air New Zealand’s Chief Digital Officer, Avi Golan, Left Silicon Valley

    Share

    Image: Courtesy of Air New Zealand

    APEX Insight: Curiosity and a knack for scanning the horizon for what’s next have served Avi Golan well through a career at some of the world’s biggest tech companies, and now as Air New Zealand’s chief digital officer.

    When Air New Zealand first approached Avi Golan to be its chief digital officer through a recruiter in late 2015, Golan’s answer was “No thank you,” as it had been with many other offers. “My immediate response was a small laugh, but I went home to my wife and she saw it in a completely different way. She said, ‘You know, Avi, we’ve been in Silicon Valley for almost 18 years, and we’ve been talking about changing for a long time.'” With the kids having grown up and left home, Avi and his wife, Osnat, were looking for a chance to explore the world. “We thought, maybe this is an opportunity. So, I called back and said, ‘OK, let’s talk.'”

    “Why would you come to Silicon Valley? Go to an airline country, or another state … Maybe Boeing town?”

    He’d traveled to Australia several times, but the only thing he knew about neighboring New Zealand was that the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies were filmed there. Yet, the opportunity had Golan intrigued. “The first question I posed to Christopher Luxon, the CEO of Air New Zealand, was, ‘Why would you come to Silicon Valley? Go to an airline country, or another state where you hire people in aviation. I don’t know where, maybe Boeing town?'”

    Air New Zealand, it turned out, was vying to be a leading digital organization, and Golan liked what he saw. “I thought it would be fascinating to take all the things I learned in my experience from working in Silicon Valley to another company to create a technology company. I didn’t know what that was at that time, but I thought it could be a challenge that I’d be happy to take.”

    Born and raised in Israel, Golan served four years in the country’s army and air force. Having excelled at math and physics during high school, he studied computer and information sciences at Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, the country’s biggest science and engineering university. Upon graduating, he worked for defense organizations followed by stints programming at large computer science firms, before immersing himself in the early days of Israel’s tech startup scene in the mid-1990s.

    Being able to take an idea and then design and create something from it meant computer programming was a natural fit. “I’m not an artist by any means. I don’t know how to draw, or paint or play a serious musical instrument, but my outlet was programming, and for me, programming is creating something,” he says.

    The socially awkward computer programmer stereotype never applied. He earned a reputation as a people person and was soon promoted to a leadership role with responsibility over teams of developers and product people. It also meant his time doing hands-on programming was shorter than usual.

    Just before the turn of the millennium, Golan transferred to Silicon Valley. A few years went by with executive roles at startups, but by 2008, he’d joined Google. During his six-year period at the company, he saw it grow from around 2,000 employees to 20,000. His knack for leadership and strategic thinking helped him climb the corporate ladder to become director of Google’s Search Ad Products.

    This was followed by what he describes as “a short gig” at Barnes and Noble, before spending two years as general manager and vice-president of Intuit, an accounting and tax software firm. Golan says his time at the 35-year-old company came with more baggage than at Google.

    “When I arrived there, I was looking at everything through Google eyes and was saying, ‘Why are you doing things like this?'”

    “When I arrived there, I was looking at everything through Google eyes and was saying, ‘Why are you doing things like this?'” As a newcomer, his ideas and proposals for changing one of Intuit’s biggest products were met with looks that said, “Are you crazy?” Two years later, the bemused looks on colleagues’ faces were gone and he was presenting these same ideas to the company’s board of directors. The response was, “We should do that.”

    Golan says that had he jumped from Google to Air New Zealand, he might not have been as successful. “It would have taken me longer to learn what change leadership is all about. Intuit was almost the step before to learn about how to change an organization.”

    As Air New Zealand’s chief digital officer, Golan says hindsight has revealed that importing a Silicon Valley-type culture wholesale to an airline is easier said than done. “People really rejected any need to transform.” Unlike Silicon Valley firms, airlines, he says, are operational and industrial organizations with safety concerns and risk adversity programmed in their DNA.

    “Over the first year, I realized I talked about technology, platforms, services, innovation, capabilities that enabled us to move faster, revenue opportunities, competitive opportunities, but nothing resonated, until something struck me – that it was all about people and changing the way they work.”

    Golan had to grapple with the fact that he could no longer easily hire new employees with the exact skill sets he required, as was the case in Silicon Valley. “I’m in New Zealand, there’s not actually enough people here to do all of that. I have 700 people, I can’t change or replace each one, and that wasn’t the plan from the get-go,” he says.

    “I needed to find a way to retrain them, to teach them and have them want to learn, and want to accept the change, constant change, because that’s what Silicon Valley organizations do all the time. They’re constantly changing, because technology is constantly changing. If you don’t move fast enough, you risk being left behind.”

    Two years into his role, Golan says Air New Zealand’s makeover into one of Australasia’s best digital organizations is taking effect. In February 2017, the airline released an artificial intelligence-powered chatbot called Oscar. In May, it trialed Microsoft’s HoloLens mixed-reality headsets to explore how such devices could one day help crewmembers by displaying customer information in front of them. And in November, Air New Zealand partnered with Winding Tree, a Switzerland-based travel startup, to explore applications based on blockchain technology. He says the airline is also experimenting with the cryptographic technology in cargo, revenue management and finance.

    “The more I think about it, the list could go on and on. I feel like we’ve opened the floodgates and the river is flowing. The team is enabled to actually explore a lot of things,” he says. “I love the fact
    that people just come to work and have fun. It’s a happy environment.”

    What about Silicon Valley? Can it learn anything from the airline industry? “One thing I can tell you for sure is that a lot of Silicon Valley organizations are very internally consumed. They’re not as customer obsessed as Air New Zealand. I can easily tell you that the Googles, Apples and Ubers of the world can come to Air New Zealand and learn how to listen to customers and how to work with customers.”

    Avi Golan: Chief Digital Officer, Air New Zealand, was originally published in the 8.1 February/March issue of APEX Experience magazine.