The Creator's Code: The Six Essential Skills of Extraordinary Entrepreneurs by Amy Wilkinson
Author:Amy Wilkinson [Wilkinson, Amy]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2015-02-16T14:00:00+00:00
TURN SETBACKS INTO STRENGTH
David Neeleman, cofounder of JetBlue, was not diagnosed with attention deficit disorder (ADD) until he was an adult. As a child, he had struggled in school and been cast as an outsider. Isolated and different, he couldn’t succeed on a traditional track and dropped out of college. That difficult beginning would be more than enough to shut down the best of us, but Neeleman forged ahead, again and again.
Over the course of his career, Neeleman has founded three successful airlines, each a trailblazer, and each time, he could have been counted out. When he was twenty-three, his first company—a travel booking business—failed after the airline he was working with filed for bankruptcy. So Neeleman tried again. Nine years later, after selling his company Morris Air to Southwest Airlines, he was dismissed by his mentor, Southwest’s Herb Kelleher. He got back up. On his third try, as cofounder and CEO of JetBlue, the company’s board fired him after the so-called Valentine’s Day Massacre, a February 14, 2007, snowstorm that stranded thousands of JetBlue passengers. Yet again, he managed to bounce back. Neeleman went on to found today’s fastest-growing airline in Brazil, Azul—the Portuguese word for blue.
“Having ADD, it drives me crazy to fly,” Neeleman said. “And I can still remember the exact spot in the office where JetBlue vice president Tom Anderson walked in and said, ‘Hey, I got this brochure about a company in Florida that’s doing live television on corporate jets.’ I said, ‘That’s it!’ ” Neeleman’s natural restlessness allowed him to see the benefit of additional in-flight stimulation for JetBlue customers. He immediately flew to Florida and cut a deal that put JetBlue in the entertainment business.
In 1999, Neeleman had raised $125 million to start JetBlue, the largest investment in the history of airlines, to “bring humanity to air travel.” He eliminated first-class seats from JetBlue’s planes to give everyone more leg room and installed leather seating that cost twice as much but would last twice as long. He chose Airbus to manufacture planes because the competition was flying narrower Boeing jets, thereby gaining an extra inch in width and two inches more in legroom for each passenger. Vowing never to overbook, JetBlue would not sell more tickets than seats, a common practice in the industry.
Known as Mr. JetBlue, Neeleman flew on the airline at least once a week. He would walk the aisles passing out snacks and soliciting feedback, help clean the aircraft after landing, and sometimes unload luggage with baggage handlers. He made a practice of sitting in the very last row to demonstrate that pleasing the customer was more important than pleasing the CEO. It worked. JetBlue took off. The airline was profitable by its third full quarter and went public in 2002.
Then came the unexpected East Coast blizzard of 2007. Icy weather grounded flights. Still, controllers sent aircraft to the runway. Some flights were stranded on the tarmac at New York’s JFK Airport for ten hours. Cancellations of some 1,700 flights over
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