The Paradox
There is a certain irony in the contemporary airport. It is at once intensely physical and increasingly intangible. Concrete, steel, runways, terminals, aprons, baggage systems and control towers remain its visible anatomy, yet much of the value generated by the modern airport is migrating into less tangible domains: data, connectivity, algorithms, passenger experience, operational intelligence, commercial ecosystems and the capacity to make decisions in real time. The airport of the future may therefore be physically recognizable while being economically and strategically unrecognizable. It is this paradox which makes Rita McGrath’s recent proposition of strategic centering particularly relevant to aviation management. In her July–August 2026 article in Harvard Business Review, “The Power of Strategic Centering,” McGrath argues that in what she calls a “dematerializing economy,” where value is shifting from physical assets towards data, software, capabilities and relationships, traditional strategic frameworks no longer provide sufficient guidance. She answers that organizations require a clear center: “a single, coherent organizing principle” around which resources, opportunities and organizational identity can be aligned. McGrath identifies five possible centers: mission, customer, technology, ecosystem and friction erasure. Strategic centering, in her formulation, is not merely the articulation of purpose. It is the deliberate selection of one organizing principle which determines where resources should go, which opportunities should be pursued and, equally importantly, which opportunities should be rejected. The center therefore becomes a mechanism of strategic discipline. For airport managers, this proposition is more than an interesting management theory. It may constitute a practical response to one of the most difficult questions confronting airport governance today: what exactly is an airport becoming?
What is the Airport?
The question is not semantic. It has consequences for investment, regulation, artificial intelligence, airport–airline relations, commercial revenues, infrastructure development, passenger experience and the allocation of scarce capital. An airport which regards itself principally as an owner and operator of physical infrastructure will make different decisions from an airport which regards itself as a transportation platform, a regional economic ecosystem, a customer-experience enterprise or an intelligent digital system. The strategic problem is therefore not simply how to introduce artificial intelligence into an airport. It is how to decide what AI is for. The traditional airport is a classic asset-based enterprise. Its competitive strength has historically rested upon scarce physical assets: runways, terminal capacity, gates, passenger-processing facilities, cargo infrastructure, geographical location and access to surrounding transportation networks.
The strategic logic was consequently relatively intelligible. If an airport had a favourable location and sufficient capacity, it possessed a form of competitive advantage that could be defended through investment and regulation. That strategic logic is becoming less complete. The contemporary airport is increasingly a data enterprise superimposed upon a physical enterprise. The aircraft remains physical; the runway remains physical; passengers remain physical. Yet the information which determines how these physical elements interact is increasingly digital. A passenger’s journey can be optimized through data. Aircraft turnaround can be predicted through machine learning. Baggage flows can be monitored algorithmically. Staffing can be adjusted dynamically. Security processes can become risk-based rather than merely sequential. Maintenance can become predictive rather than reactive. Airport retail can become personalized. Airside congestion can be anticipated before it becomes visible. The implication is profound. Data is becoming an infrastructure of the airport just as much as concrete and steel.
Key Issues
This is precisely where McGrath’s analysis becomes useful. The dematerialization of an industry does not mean that physical assets disappear. Rather, the source of strategic value increasingly migrates from the physical asset to the information, relationships and capabilities surrounding it. McGrath’s thesis is that organizations operating in such an environment need a new strategic anchor. For airports, this raises an immediate management dilemma. If the airport continues to measure success primarily by passengers processed, aircraft movements, square metres of terminal space and aeronautical revenues, it may overlook the intangible capabilities which increasingly determine whether the physical infrastructure is efficiently utilized. The airport manager must therefore ask: Are we managing an infrastructure asset, or are we managing an intelligent transportation system? The answer need not abolish the first proposition. But it may place it within the second. Perhaps the most useful question that strategic centering poses for airport management is a deceptively simple one: are you in the airport business or in the transportation business? The distinction is consequential. If an airport is in the airport business, its center may naturally be the terminal, runway, passenger facility or aeronautical operation. Its principal concerns may be capacity, concession revenues, landing fees, parking and infrastructure utilization. If it is in the transportation business, the physical airport becomes one component of a broader mobility system. The passenger’s journey begins before arrival at the terminal and continues after departure from it. Rail, road, taxi, public transit, ridesharing, baggage, border processing, airline schedules and digital information all become part of the transportation experience.
Teleology and Ontology
This is where strategic centering differs from purpose. Purpose asks why an organization exists. Centering asks what organizing principle will govern its choices. McGrath emphasizes that centering provides a coherent basis for resource allocation and opportunity selection in an environment in which traditional industry boundaries have become less useful. For an airport, the distinction could be decisive. An airport may have a purpose statement proclaiming its commitment to safe, efficient and sustainable aviation. That is valuable but insufficient. The management board must still decide whether to spend $100 million on expanding terminal retail, modernizing baggage systems, developing an AI platform, improving rail connectivity, expanding aircraft stands or acquiring data capabilities. Purpose does not necessarily resolve the dilemma. A strategic center can. The airport has traditionally divided its business into two principal domains: aeronautical and non-aeronautical activity. Aeronautical revenues derive broadly from the aviation function—landing charges, passenger fees, aircraft parking and related services. Non-aeronautical revenues arise from retail, food and beverage, parking, property, advertising, lounges and other commercial activities. The distinction is becoming increasingly artificial. The passenger does not experience these activities as separate economic compartments. A passenger’s decision to purchase a meal, enter a lounge, use Wi-Fi, shop, park a vehicle or select a particular route is influenced by the totality of the airport experience. Moreover, airlines increasingly compete through ancillary services, while airports increasingly compete through passenger experience and commercial ecosystems. The boundaries between airline and airport value creation consequently become blurred.
Airports vs. Airlines
This produces an obvious source of tension. Airlines may regard airport charges as a cost that should be minimized. Airports may regard aeronautical charges as necessary to finance infrastructure. Airlines may seek greater control over passenger data and commercial relationships. Airports may argue that passenger data is essential to improving the total airport experience. Airlines may seek rapid aircraft turnarounds while airports must reconcile that objective with security, passenger-processing, gate utilization and other operational constraints. The conventional response is negotiation. The more interesting question is whether AI can become an instrument of compromise. The answer is potentially yes, provided AI is not regarded as a substitute for governance. An AI-enabled airport could integrate historical operational data, passenger flows, aircraft movements, gate utilization, turnaround performance, retail activity, congestion, staffing, weather and commercial information to model alternative decisions. Instead of airport and airline management negotiating from institutional positions, they could negotiate from a shared evidence base. Consider a simple example. An airline argues that a particular gate configuration imposes excessive turnaround costs. The airport argues that changing the allocation would reduce overall terminal efficiency. An AI system could model multiple scenarios: aircraft turnaround time, passenger walking distances, baggage transfer, gate conflicts, staffing requirements, connection risks and resulting commercial activity. The question then becomes not “who wins?” but “which configuration creates the greatest system value subject to agreed constraints?” That is a fundamentally different form of management. AI becomes not merely an automation technology but an epistemic instrument—a means of knowing the system more comprehensively before deciding how it should be managed.
Strategic Advantage
McGrath’s earlier work questioned the durability of competitive advantage. The proposition has particular force in aviation because technological and commercial advantages are increasingly transient. An airport may possess a sophisticated biometric system today and find that the technology has become commonplace tomorrow. It may develop an excellent passenger app only to discover that competitors can replicate the functionality. It may build a sophisticated data platform only to find that cloud-based capabilities have democratized access to similar technology. The strategic consequence is that airport managers should be cautious about confusing technology ownership with strategic advantage. AI itself does not necessarily constitute a sustainable competitive advantage. If every major airport can acquire similar large language models, computer-vision systems, predictive analytics or agentic AI, then possessing the technology is unlikely to be sufficient. The advantage lies instead in how the technology is embedded in the organization. An airport with excellent data governance, interoperable systems, skilled personnel, trusted relationships with airlines and regulators, high-quality operational data and a culture capable of acting on AI-generated insight may enjoy a substantial advantage. Another airport possessing the same software but fragmented databases, institutional resistance and poorly defined decision rights may obtain very little value from it. The center therefore becomes crucial.
The Fivefold Focus
McGrath identifies five ways in which an organization might centre itself: mission, customer, technology, ecosystem and friction erasure. Each has a different implication for airport management. A mission-centered airport begins with the problem it exists to solve. The problem might be defined as enabling safe and efficient movement of people and goods. It might be broader: connecting a region to the world while generating economic and social value. The advantage of mission-centring is that it prevents the airport from becoming captive to a particular technology. AI becomes an instrument rather than an objective. If the mission is efficient and safe mobility, the airport may use AI today for predictive maintenance, tomorrow for autonomous ground operations and later for technologies not yet conceived. The airport remains loyal to the problem rather than to the technology. This may be particularly appropriate for public-sector or heavily regulated airports whose legitimacy derives from the transportation function rather than commercial profit alone. A customer-centred airport asks: Whom are we serving? The answer is not simply “passengers.” The airport serves passengers, airlines, cargo operators, employees, concessionaires, governments, communities and, increasingly, the wider regional economy. The danger is that excessive multiplicity can itself destroy the value of centering. The airport manager therefore has to determine which customer relationship is strategically primary. AI can be extraordinarily powerful in customer centering. It can identify passenger flows, predict needs, personalize information, detect bottlenecks and provide real-time assistance. But customer centering also raises ethical questions. An airport cannot treat passengers merely as data points from which commercial value is extracted. The customer centre must therefore include trust.
Technology centering is perhaps the most tempting centre for the contemporary airport. The question becomes: What can our technological capabilities do? AI offers an enormous opportunity set. Computer vision can support security and operational monitoring. Machine learning can predict congestion. Generative AI can assist employees. Digital twins can model airport operations. Autonomous systems may transform ground handling. AI agents may eventually coordinate complex operational tasks. Yet technology centering contains a danger. The airport can become fascinated by the technological solution before identifying the problem. The consequence is the familiar phenomenon of technology looking for an application. An airport may acquire an AI platform because AI is strategically fashionable, rather than because it solves a defined operational problem. For this reason, an airport that centres on technology must impose a rigorous test: What measurable capability does this technology create that the airport genuinely needs?
For many airports, ecosystem centering may be the most consequential. The airport is not an isolated enterprise. It is a node within a system comprising airlines, air navigation service providers, ground handlers, security agencies, customs and immigration authorities, rail and road operators, hotels, tourism agencies, cargo interests, technology providers and surrounding communities. The airport may therefore ask: What system are we building? This question moves management away from optimizing the airport in isolation toward optimizing the transportation ecosystem. AI could become the connective tissue. A regional airport ecosystem could use shared data and AI to coordinate aircraft arrivals, ground transportation, rail connections, staffing, passenger flows and disruption management. The objective would not be to maximize one organization’s performance metric but to improve system performance. Such an approach, however, requires governance. Data sharing cannot simply be assumed. Privacy, cybersecurity, commercial confidentiality, competition law and institutional accountability must be addressed. An AI ecosystem without governance could become an ecosystem of opacity.
The fifth centre is perhaps the most immediately useful for airport managers. McGrath asks: “What’s unnecessarily hard?” Her friction-erasure model organizes an organization around the systematic elimination of unnecessary difficulty. She observes that digital technology can be particularly powerful in this regard because it can replace slow physical or bureaucratic processes with simpler digital ones. The airport is a monument to friction. Passengers queue. Bags are transferred. Security checks are repeated. Gates change. Information is fragmented. Employees interact with multiple legacy systems. Airlines and airports exchange data through different technological architectures. Ground handlers operate through separate systems. Disruption generates cascading consequences. The airport manager should therefore ask an apparently radical question: What if the principal strategic objective of the airport were to remove unnecessary friction from the journey? AI could then be deployed systematically against friction. Predictive systems could anticipate congestion before queues develop. Intelligent staffing could allocate personnel dynamically. Computer vision could identify bottlenecks. Generative AI could provide employees with immediate access to operational knowledge. AI-based disruption management could recommend alternative gate, baggage and passenger-flow configurations. But friction erasure must not become an excuse for eliminating safeguards. A security check is not “friction” merely because a passenger dislikes it. A regulatory requirement is not unnecessary simply because it slows a process. Aviation is a safety-critical system. Some friction is protective. The correct question is therefore not “How do we eliminate friction?” but “How do we distinguish unnecessary friction from necessary safety, security and regulatory controls?” That distinction is fundamental.
Advantages of Strategic Centering
One of the most important practical consequences of centering is that it resolves what McGrath describes as the problem of digital allocation. Airports today face an almost unlimited menu of digital investments. Artificial intelligence, digital twins, biometrics, robotics, autonomous vehicles, predictive maintenance, cloud migration, cybersecurity, passenger analytics, intelligent baggage systems and generative AI all compete for finite capital. Without a centre, the airport risks becoming a technological bazaar. Every department has a convincing business case. Security wants AI surveillance. Marketing wants personalization. Operations wants predictive analytics. Finance wants automated forecasting. Human resources wants AI-assisted recruitment. Customer service wants conversational AI. Engineering wants digital twins. The result can be fragmented investment and fragmented data. Strategic centering imposes a hierarchy. If the centre is friction erasure, the question for every AI proposal becomes: does it remove meaningful friction? If the centre is ecosystem, the question becomes: does it improve system-wide coordination? If the centre is customer, the question becomes: does it improve the customer’s journey in a measurable and trustworthy manner? If the centre is mission, the question becomes: does it advance the airport’s fundamental transportation objective? If the centre is technology, the question becomes: does it exploit a distinctive capability in a manner that generates coherent opportunities? The centre thus becomes a filter. And in an age of technological abundance, the capacity to say no may be as important as the capacity to innovate.
Metacognition
There is, however, a further dimension which airport managers should not overlook. AI changes not merely how decisions are made but potentially who makes them. An airport manager traditionally exercises judgment through experience, institutional knowledge and established procedures. An AI system introduces another source of judgment: the algorithmic recommendation. This creates a governance question. Who is accountable when an AI system recommends a gate allocation that causes a cascading operational failure? Who explains a security decision generated by an opaque model? Who is responsible when an AI system produces a biased passenger-risk assessment? Who determines whether the AI should be overridden? Strategic centering cannot answer these questions by itself. But it can establish the governing principle within which they are answered. An airport centred on safety and mission, for example, cannot allow an AI optimization system to sacrifice safety for efficiency. An airport centred on customer experience cannot permit personalization to violate privacy. An ecosystem-centred airport cannot demand data from partners without establishing reciprocal governance arrangements. AI therefore requires not merely technological governance but strategic governance.
Perhaps McGrath’s most important insight for aviation management lies in her observation that organizations confronted with uncertainty frequently default to “safe” decisions. They spread resources among competing priorities, avoid difficult choices and consequently slow adaptation. The airport is particularly vulnerable to this phenomenon because it is capital-intensive, highly regulated and safety-critical. Managers are understandably cautious. Yet caution can become institutional inertia. The airport of the future cannot be built by simply extrapolating the airport of the past. The strategic centre should therefore provide the discipline necessary to distinguish prudence from paralysis. An airport does not become unsafe because it innovates. It becomes unsafe when it innovates without governance. Nor does an airport become strategically disciplined by refusing to change. It becomes disciplined when it understands why it is changing, what it is changing toward and what it will not change. This is the essence of centering.
The practical application of strategic centering can therefore begin with five questions: What problem does our airport fundamentally exist to solve? Whose experience are we fundamentally seeking to improve? Which technological capabilities can materially transform our performance? What larger transportation ecosystem are we attempting to build? What remains unnecessarily difficult for passengers, airlines, employees and other stakeholders? The airport should answer all five questions, but it should not necessarily centre itself on all five. That is the critical point. McGrath’s argument is not that an organization should ignore four of the five dimensions. Rather, one should become the organizing principle through which the others are evaluated. The centre “bounds the opportunity set without closing it,” allowing an organization to pursue a coherent family of opportunities without becoming imprisoned within a narrow industry definition. For airports, this is particularly attractive. An airport centred on transportation may still develop retail. An airport centred on customers may still invest in aircraft operations. An airport centred on an ecosystem may still operate terminals. An airport centred on friction erasure may still maintain stringent security. Centering does not reduce the airport’s universe. It gives that universe a gravitational centre.
My Take
The greatest value of McGrath’s concept for aviation lies not in identifying which of the five centers is universally superior, but in forcing airport managers to recognize that strategy without a center becomes an accumulation of projects. The danger confronting aviation today is not a shortage of technology. It is precisely the opposite. There is an abundance of technology, capital proposals, digital initiatives and competing visions of the future. AI will intensify this abundance. The airport therefore needs a principle by which AI can be judged. In my view, friction erasure and ecosystem centering deserve particular attention in airport management, but neither should be adopted mechanically. Friction erasure is powerful because airports contain enormous quantities of unnecessary complexity. Ecosystem centering is equally compelling because no airport can fulfil its function independently of airlines, air navigation, ground transportation, border agencies, communities and passengers.
The two can be reconciled. The airport can position its strategic center as a seamless, safe, intelligent transportation ecosystem, with friction reduction as the principal test for AI deployment. That formulation would preserve the airport’s regulatory and safety responsibilities while allowing it to transcend the traditional conception of an airport as merely a place where aircraft arrive and depart. The central question for airport management should consequently not be: “How can we use AI?” That is the wrong starting point. The correct question is: “What are we trying to make better, and what should be the organizing principle by which every investment, including AI, is judged?” Once that question is answered, AI becomes less mysterious. It becomes an instrument. And that distinction may determine whether artificial intelligence becomes another layer of technological complexity imposed upon an already complicated airport, or whether it becomes the means by which the airport finally achieves strategic coherence.
McGrath’s proposition is ultimately a proposition about choice. In an environment in which industry boundaries are dissolving, competitive advantages are increasingly transient and intangible assets are assuming greater importance, the strategic center provides a way of deciding where to stand without pretending that the ground beneath the organization is permanent. For aviation, this is particularly important because the airport will remain simultaneously a physical place, a regulated enterprise, a commercial undertaking and a node in a global transportation network. Its future therefore cannot be found simply by building more terminal space or acquiring more technology. It must be found by determining what the airport is really about. Once that center is clear, resources can follow. AI can follow. The ecosystem can follow. And, most importantly, decisions can follow. That is perhaps the most pragmatic lesson strategic centering offers the airport manager: do not allow technology to determine the strategy. Determine the strategy first, and then make technology serve it.
