Flying High: How JetBlue Founder and CEO David Neeleman Beats the Competition . . . Even in the World's Most Turbulent Industry: Even in the World's Most Turbulent Industry - Softcover

Wynbrandt, James

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0471756989 ISBN 13: 9780471756989

Verlag: Wiley, 2006

Inhaltsangabe

Flying High traces the incredible career of the founder and chairman of JetBlue, David Neeleman, from his teenage ventures and beginnings in the travel industry., to his short stint at Southwest Airlines and the ultimate launch of JetBlue. In a series of interviews with Neeleman's friends, associates, and high-ranking officials in both business and aviation, this books tells the store of Neeleman and explores the rules of success he both lives and builds his companies by.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

James Wynbrandt is a New York–based author and award-winning aviation and business reporter. He is a regular contributor to numerous high-profile aviation publications, including Smithsonian Air and Space, Plane & Pilot, General Aviation News, Southern Aviator, and Pilot Journal. A licensed pilot, Wynbrandt has been following JetBlue since the company's founding. His articles on business and aviation have also appeared in the New York Times, Management Review, Computer and Electronics Marketing, Flying, and Aspen Magazine, among others.

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Praise for Flying High

"If you want to know what it takes to develop a great business―not just an airline―Flying High is a must-read. James Wynbrandt does an excellent job of bringing JetBlue founder David Neeleman's amazing personal journey and business innovativeness to life in an interesting and exciting manner."
―Dave Sclair, Publisher Emeritus, General Aviation News

"James Wynbrandt adeptly captures the elements that have made David Neeleman and his remarkable airline, JetBlue, a huge success. Flying High is a tribute to Neeleman's true depth. By developing a visionary business model and the right communications strategy, he was able to pilot JetBlue to profitability with finesse. It's a must-read for people in any business seeking success."
―Howard J. Rubenstein, President, Rubenstein Associates, Inc.

"In Flying High, James Wynbrandt tells the completely beguiling story of how a former Mormon missionary with attention deficit disorder and a history of both bankruptcy and getting fired from a high-profile job created one of the great airline successes of our time. What is David Neeleman's secret at JetBlue? It's a new concept called understanding what your customers really need. Neeleman's fanatical attention to customer satisfaction, employee relations, and technology make for such a fascinating read. I raced through the book in one sitting."
―Rinker Buck, Aviation journalist and author, Flight of Passage: A Memoir

"If you want to know what it takes to develop a great business—not just an airline—Flying High is a must-read. James Wynbrandt does an excellent job of bringing JetBlue founder David Neeleman's amazing personal journey and business innovativeness to life in an interesting and exciting manner."
—Dave Sclair, Publisher Emeritus, General Aviation News

"James Wynbrandt adeptly captures the elements that have made David Neeleman and his remarkable airline, JetBlue, a huge success. Flying High is a tribute to Neeleman's true depth. By developing a visionary business model and the right communications strategy, he was able to pilot JetBlue to profitability with finesse. It's a must-read for people in any business seeking success."
—Howard J. Rubenstein, President, Rubenstein Associates, Inc.

"In Flying High, James Wynbrandt tells the completely beguiling story of how a former Mormon missionary with attention deficit disorder and a history of both bankruptcy and getting fired from a high-profile job created one of the great airline successes of our time. What is David Neeleman's secret at JetBlue? It's a new concept called understanding what your customers really need. Neeleman's fanatical attention to customer satisfaction, employee relations, and technology make for such a fascinating read. I raced through the book in one sitting."
—Rinker Buck, Aviation journalist and author, Flight of Passage: A Memoir

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Flying High

How Jetblue Founder and CEO David Neeleman Beats the Competition... Even in the World's Most Turbulent IndustryBy James Wynbrandt

John Wiley & Sons

Copyright © 2004 James Wynbrandt
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780471756989

Chapter One

The Journey Begins

David Neeleman claims he still recalls the moment from his second birthday. Whether he remembers the actual event, or only the ingrained impressions of early viewings of it captured in a family photograph, as his father, Gary, suggests with a chuckle, no one knows. But anyone looking for clues to the future course of this airline innovator's life can't ignore the significance of his recollection, imagined or otherwise. When the birthday cake was brought out, it wasn't the glowing candles that caught David's attention. There atop the confection sat a small red airplane. Something about the ornamental craft transfixed him, he says. This fascination followed him into adulthood, leading to a series of successful aviation businesses and eventually the founding of an airline that is transforming the airline industry, sparking copycat competitors, and forcing the old-line carriers that historically dominated the domestic skies to rethink their operating principles and practices.

The birthday was celebrated in Sco Paulo, Brazil, where Neeleman was born in October of 1959. He was the second son and child in a brood of seven, four boys and three girls. His father, Gary, a Salt Lake City native, was the Latin America bureau chief for United Press International (UPI), a high-profile position in the sophisticated city. His mother, Rose, had been Gary's assistant before becoming his wife.

The Neeleman family (they pronounce their name in three syllables, Nee-le-man) had immigrated to the United States from Holland, where they'd been members of the Mormon church, around the turn of the last century. Gary's father, John, was born a few months after the Neelemans arrived in Salt Lake City.

Gary graduated with a degree in fine arts from the University of Utah, but took up journalism because it offered more of a future. His fluency in several languages, including Portuguese, had served him well in his theater studies and helped him win the choice posting in Brazil. UPI's Latin American desk-also known as Latam or the Chester desk (referring to either a radio transmitter in Chester, Pennsylvania, or a long-forgotten telex operator by that name, according to UPI lore)-was the heart of UPI's Spanish-language wire news service. For much of the last century it was the preeminent international news organization in Central and South America. Latin America was also one of UPI's most successful and lucrative markets.

Reporting the news was only one of the challenges of Gary Neeleman's job. Just getting the hardware the bureau needed to operate was a monumental task. "It was a torment," Gary recalls. "You couldn't import anything. We'd go to the foreign ministry and say, 'Look, we've got to have another seven teletype machines because Eisenhower is coming,' and they might (occasionally) give us a break."

Young David Neeleman was clearly a precocious boy. Early on he exhibited his own unique talents in a family of high-achieving children. "David was one that was full of ideas, very, very active, and thinking outside the box all the time," says Gary Neeleman.

Brazil in the early 1960s was a time and place of rigid class distinctions, doubly so for the U.S. citizens who worked for American companies with operations in Brazil. The country's upper class, to which the foreign-born executives of multinational companies belonged de facto, and the teeming masses of the poor were in permanent conflict. Yet upper- and lower-class Brazilians were united in their antipathy for what was seen as heavy-handed American influence over the country's business and culture.

Anti-Americanism was a driving force in the country's body politic. "One group put out a booklet entitled 'A Day in the Life of a Brazilian,' in which a cartoon character wakes up, brushes his teeth with Colgate toothpaste, eats his Kellogg's cereal with orange juice packaged by General Mills, then drives his Ford to work, where he takes an Otis elevator to his office," says Gary Neeleman, recalling the prevailing attitude of the time.

Gary Neeleman exhibited none of the colonialist attitudes common to foreign-born managers of the era, who often displayed a condescending and patronizing manner to the locals. While many U.S.-born news executives in Latin America questioned the abilities and sympathies of Latin-born reporters, Neeleman fiercely defended their professionalism during his 27 years at the news organization.

"Just because wages are lower in those countries does not mean the talent is less," he maintained. "I know journalists in those countries who can write rings around most U.S. journalists. ... I want to debunk the 'fact' that just because somebody is a local hire he's inferior."

When David Neeleman was five, his father was transferred back to the United States and returned to Salt Lake City with his family. David was enrolled in the Peruvian Park Elementary School. Though the name may have provided some link to his early years in South America, the transition to primary school wasn't an easy one. "It was an adjustment," Gary admits. "The kids spoke better Portuguese than they did English." Gary recalls that David was "a handful," a child who was "clearly bright but a window gazer who constantly fell behind on his lessons" and who "was always looking out the window, thinking of something else."

David Neeleman's third grade teacher prophetically told his mother that he could be "tremendously successful when he grows up-if he hires himself an assistant." But the teacher was more sanguine than others about young David's chances for eventual achievement. In fact, Neeleman recalls he was almost left behind that year. "They wanted me to repeat the third grade, but my parents said, 'He's a smart kid. You don't know what you're talking about.'" In the end, Neeleman was permitted to move up to the fourth grade.

An inability to focus and a short attention span dogged Neeleman outside the classroom as well. "David hated fishing," his father remembers. "He didn't have the patience. He would start fishing, and two minutes later, he is throwing rocks in the pond."

FIRST LESSONS IN CUSTOMER SERVICE

It was during this time of educational turmoil that Neeleman acquired his initial lesson in the ingredients of business success, through the example of the family patriarch-his grandfather, John Neeleman. John, the first of the Neelemans born in the United States, started what has been purported to be the first convenience store in the country. Called the Miniature Market, on South Street in Salt Lake City, it was in business before the first 7-Eleven opened its doors. From the start, John Neeleman had strong ideas about customer service, according to Gary, his son.

"Dad's main idea was that you don't tell the customer you can't do it or you don't have it," Gary Neeleman explains. "You do everything humanly possible to make it happen."

In fact, though it was open around the clock, John Neeleman didn't consider his establishment to be a convenience store, but rather a "service store." It served a collection of customers that included split-shifters, truck drivers, college students, late-working waitresses, and entertainers. As local reporter Fred Ball recalls, John "cashed their checks when nobody else would, delivered groceries to nearby apartment houses,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Wiley
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2006
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0471756989
• ISBN 13: 9780471756989
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 306
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Wiley-VCH GmbH; product_safety@wiley.com; ; Boschstrasse 12; Weinheim; 69469; Deutschland