Flight Centre Limited is an anomaly in the business world—a modern-day organization with an underlying corporate structure that comes from the Stone Age. This updated edition
ofFamily Village Tribe is essential reading for anyone interested in the machinations of starting a successful business from the ground up and staying there.
＂I didn’t realize my life had been hijacked until a year after it happened.＂ That’s Mandy Johnson’s take on her introduction into the world of Flight Centre Limited—the travel company
that divides its workforce into ＂families,＂ ＂villages,＂ and ＂tribes,＂ and rewards them with autonomy and incentives. From its origins in 1973 as a UK tour company with a single bus called
＂Bollocks,＂ FCL revolutionized the travel industry and morphed into a global giant. It faced challenges including the War on Terror and SARS that wreaked havoc on business. It battled the
encroachment of the internet; a disastrous internal restructure; and a US acquisition that delivered a profit wipe-out, just months before the global financial crisis. And yet each time FCL
has come back stronger than before, almost doubling in size every five years, relying on its Stone Age tribal structure as its platform for success. Its founders were two 23-year-old
veterinarians from Queensland, Australia. Neither had any business experience and the idea for the company was hatched while celebrating in a Munich beer hall . . . . So how did they make it
work? Mandy Johnson and Katrina Beikoff have enjoyed full access to all the major players in FCL to bring us the full story in this updated edition.
