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Doug Parker
98 Plays1 year ago
This is Move The Needle with Rob Kaplan, where we talk to people who lead, innovate and inspire. What's it like to have taken over a major American airline just ten days before 9/11? Today on Move The Needle, Rob talks to Doug Parker, a longtime airline leader, about that and how the industry changed after that.
Doug Parker retired as CEO of American Airlines in March 2022 after more than 35 years in the airline industry, including 20 years as CEO. He was named CEO of American following the merger of American and US Airways in 2013. Doug continues to serve as chairman of American’s board of directors.
Doug remains a strong supporter of the people of the airline industry and American is emblematic of the transformation that has occurred in the industry in recent years. The integration of American and US Airways was a success and the airline made unprecedented investments in its team members and product while returning money to shareholders. Doug’s leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic helped stabilize the industry during an unprecedented decline in demand for air travel.
Previously, Doug was Chairman and CEO of US Airways. Under his leadership, the airline achieved record revenue growth, operational performance and profit margins that outpaced most industry peers. Doug served as Chairman, President and CEO of America West Airlines prior to the merger of US Airways and America West in 2005. He became CEO of America West 10 days before Sept. 11, 2001 and led the carrier through the crisis.
Doug’s experience prior to joining America West in 1995 includes four years with Northwest Airlines as Vice President, Assistant Treasurer and Vice President of Financial Planning and Analysis. From 1986 to 1991, he held several financial management positions with American.
Doug received the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Wings Club Foundation and the Legend in Leadership Award from the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute, in recognition of his extraordinary career. He is a member of the Vanderbilt University Board of Trust, the SMU Cox School of Business Executive Board, the Medal of Honor Museum Foundation Board of Directors and the International Air Transport Association Board of Governors.
Doug earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Albion College in 1984 and an MBA from Vanderbilt University in 1986. He married his wife, Gwen, in 1990 and they have three children: Jackson, Luke and Eliza.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:12
Speaker
This is Move the Needle with Rob Kaplan, where we talk to people who lead, innovate and inspire.
9/11 Recollections and Industry Impact
00:00:19
Speaker
I was up, but I was getting ready for work and got a call from my sister of all people saying an airplane had flown into one of the towers. She had seen it on TV and I turned on the TV and that's when we all thought it was just some small aircraft. Continue to get ready and then the second airplane hit, my phone immediately rings.
00:00:37
Speaker
What's it like to have taken over a major American airline just 10 days before 9-11? Today on Move the Needle, Rob talks to Doug Parker, a longtime airline leader, about that and how the industry changed after the attack.
00:00:55
Speaker
So I first met Doug Parker back in 2015 when I first moved to Dallas to take over the job running the Dallas
Doug Parker's Entry into the Airline Industry
00:01:03
Speaker
Fed. And Doug was the CEO of American Airlines and I used to talk to him
00:01:10
Speaker
every four to six weeks to try to understand what was going on in the travel industry, among workers, the business dynamics of the airline industry. And so I've gotten to know Doug very, very well. And I found him to be a superb CEO
00:01:31
Speaker
very insightful, very thoughtful, very interested in the community. And he's somebody that runs a big business, but he wants to make a positive impact in the world and everything he does. And Doug, welcome. Glad to have you here. Thanks, Rob. Happy to be here. Appreciate it. First of all, Doug, I thought I'd go back to the beginning and talk a little bit about your life. And let's start with you right out of school, went right into the airline industry.
00:02:00
Speaker
Why airlines? Did you always have an interest in being in the airline business? Yeah, not so much. This is an industry where so many people grew up watching airplanes take off at the airport and jet fuel in their veins. And I'm not one of those people, frankly. I went straight from undergrad through graduate school at Vanderbilt, came out of school with an MBA in finance. I wanted to go somewhere where finance was important.
Culture at American Airlines under Bob Crandall
00:02:28
Speaker
That I knew and certainly the airline industry fit that bill being how heavily capitalized it is. So it was in kind of my target groups of industries to look at. And fortunately, you know, I was in Nashville at the time of American was building a hub in Nashville. So they came and recruited on campus. But that's really how it came about. Now, once I got into it, it's all I've ever done. And I love the business. But it is not it was it was serendipitous in some part that I found it because I really was not one of those people.
00:02:58
Speaker
And still not as much as I love the business. I've never gotten to where I'm not a pilot. I'm not, again, the person that can tell you all about the mechanics of flight backwards and forwards and identify airplanes. But it's an incredible business with incredible people. That's how I got into it. So you and your career, I know, have had a number of mentors and coaches in the industry. But you started, as you mentioned, at American Airlines and with Bob Crandall, who is
00:03:28
Speaker
famous longtime CEO of American Airlines. What was it like to work for Bob Crandall from 1986 to 1991? And what did you learn from him? You know, over the five years I was there, I got to be in a number of meetings with him and now know him incredibly well. And anyway, the entire culture was driven around Bob. So even if you didn't spend a lot of time with Bob personally, you knew it was Bob's airline.
00:03:55
Speaker
And it was all designed around him. He was incredible. He was hard driving, incredibly competitive. And we at American at the time just knew we were the best. Even if maybe we weren't, we sure believed it. Because that's what Bob believed. He may as well believe it. And we were going to be the best. We went and hired the best people.
00:04:18
Speaker
I had the best airplanes and we were gonna make sure that everyone knew we were the best airline in the world and that's how it felt and Bob built that. This is what American Airlines does better than anyone else. Arrive on time. Again and again. In fact, American has had the best on time arrival record of the seven largest domestic airlines for as long as records have been kept.
00:04:46
Speaker
American Airlines, the on time machine. I'll tell you what he did. What he did do, which I noticed when you can't do anymore, was it was a different era. And Bob just built that company to bring him information. And then he would, you know, he with his team would decide what to do and then just send it down through the machine and we would go execute. But the information flow is much too quick. Now, I'm sure Bob would have adapted.
00:05:15
Speaker
It was a lot of command and control. A lot of information is power, a different era, but Bob was the best at it.
00:05:24
Speaker
So I myself was in a number of meetings with Bob Crandall over the years and his public persona was as very tough, tough on unions, tough on people, as you said, very hard driving. Sometimes even his public persona was quick to anger. Was he like that to work for? Yeah.
00:05:50
Speaker
He was and I don't think he'd mind me saying it. But again, he was always driven with the best interest at heart. He cared about the airline, he cared about the people on the airline, and he wanted everyone to care as much as he did. And if he didn't, he got really upset and he could get upset. But it wasn't personal, it wasn't
00:06:11
Speaker
Um, anything, you know, it was, it was simply, uh, he really wanted everyone to care as much as he did.
Challenges and Opportunities at Northwest Airlines
00:06:17
Speaker
And he would, yeah, he'd get upset and there'd be, there were times he, you know, we all got screamed at at one time or another by Bob, but none of us took it personally. Um, and again, and generally he was almost always right. So it was hard. It was hard to argue with him. Um, he was, he was, he cared a lot.
00:06:32
Speaker
Now, after you worked at American, you also worked at another iconic airline, Northwest Airlines, where Al Cheque was the CEO. I'll ask before we get to your CEO career, what did you learn working for Al Cheque at Northwest Airlines? I was fortunate to be one of those recruited up to Minneapolis to work on a turnaround of Northwest Airlines.
00:06:58
Speaker
And it was fantastic. American was already built. At Northwest, we could go build something. And we built a finance department. We built an organization. And they had taken it private. And I was there to bring it out and through an IPO and great experience for me, which allowed me to move on to bigger things later
9/11's Immediate Impact on Airlines
00:07:21
Speaker
on. So I enjoyed it there, learned a lot, and it really fascinated me.
00:07:26
Speaker
So then you went on to become chief financial officer at American West airlines. And then you went on to become CEO of that company 10 days before 9 11.
00:07:39
Speaker
We want to tell you what we know as we know it. We just got a report in that there's been some sort of explosion at the World Trade Center in New York City. One report said, and we can't confirm any of this, that a plane may have hit one of the two towers of the World Trade Center. But again, you're seeing the live pictures here.
00:07:59
Speaker
We have no further details than that. We don't know anything about what they have concluded happened there this morning. But we're going to find out and, of course, make sure that everybody knows on the air. These are, of course, the two twin Trade Center buildings that are down at the foot of Manhattan that they really are the beacons of New York. What I went through was, you know, it was, America was based in Phoenix, Arizona. It was, you know, when those airplanes hit the towers, it was 6 a.m. in Phoenix.
00:08:29
Speaker
And I was up, but I was getting ready for work. And I got a call from my sister of all people saying an airplane had flown into one of the towers. She had seen it on TV. And I turned on the TV. And that's when we all thought it was just some small aircraft continue to get ready. And then the second airplane hit, my phone immediately rings. And it's someone from our airline telling me that the FAA has grounded every airplane get put on the ground.
00:08:57
Speaker
So, you know, everything changed from that point on. Hustled in as fast as I could into work. We're all just assembled there, you know, in constant contact with the FAA as to what's going to happen. But, you know, the best news was hearing that all of our airplanes were safely on the ground. But immediately knowing that our friends at United and American didn't have the same type of information and felt terrible for them.
00:09:22
Speaker
And then I'll tell you it quickly, it turned into, clearly it was about when are we getting airplanes flying again, but it quickly turned into what are we gonna do about this crisis? People aren't gonna wanna fly. We were already in some trouble and we had to start working on figuring out what in the world we were gonna do to save our airline and save the industry. You talked about just even today what it's like to have gone through the emotions of that, particularly if you were at American Airlines. What was the emotional scarring?
00:09:50
Speaker
of that event, you think on not just people at America West, but also at American Airlines and in the industry, what was the emotional impact of having gone through that? I'll tell you this, we still have thousands of people in our airline that were flight attendants and pilots that day. And when you talk to them, they wouldn't put their uniforms back on. When the country was afraid to fly, they wouldn't put their uniforms back on, went back and got themselves in the air.
00:10:19
Speaker
And yeah, they were brave, but they were doing it for their colleagues. They were doing it for the country and they still do it
Post-9/11 Safety Measures and Industry Evolution
00:10:28
Speaker
today. And they're still out there putting those uniforms on and they still remember their colleagues. And it's still part of it. It's going to be forever, but it's palpable still, and certainly on that day. Yeah, I can imagine. From that time,
00:10:44
Speaker
How long did it take to get the people back comfortable flying? And what are some of the things you did to get people comfortable flying again? We went and fortified the cockpit doors. We put air marshals in. The US government stood up TSA. All those things took several months.
00:11:09
Speaker
I remember testifying in front of Congress for the support we needed sometime in mid-October, and our load vectors were 20%. 20% of our seats were full of that. And that was true at all airlines.
00:11:29
Speaker
My recollection, Rob, it was sometime March of 2002 before people actually felt comfortable flying again at the same level they did before.
00:11:54
Speaker
So early in my career, and I'd say for many years, the airline industry was an industry that many investors just stayed away from. There was lots over capacity, a lot of different airlines.
00:12:10
Speaker
And the industry could just never seem to work out how to balance passenger demand with seat availability. And one of the reasons were there were just so many different airlines. The mergers among the airlines over all these years basically rationalized the industry. And now they also took away access from small towns and other places where if a flight just wasn't economic,
00:12:35
Speaker
They stopped running those flights, but it rationalized the industry to where you could reasonably make a profit and you got away from the boom-bust cycle that the airline had found itself in for decades. The industry was just sick as could be, was broken, serial bankruptcies.
00:12:57
Speaker
Every airline from 2001 and through that period went, every airline, with the exception of Southwest, went through some sort of bankruptcy. You know, like I say, two at US Airways, one at Northwest, one at Continental, one at United, one at American. And, you know, we at America West were fortunate enough to avoid that by getting some scale through mergers by those who went in. So.
00:13:19
Speaker
We needed to consolidate. None of us had networks that could provide the utility the customer wanted. Now we do. We got a merger of United Continental, Northwest Delta, American U.S. Airways. Now you have three airlines at least of real scale that can take people all around the globe intensely competitive with each other. And then a lot of airlines
00:13:43
Speaker
flying point to point around the United States, most notably Southwest, but others like Frontier and Spirit and JetBlue, who keep the industry incredibly competitive, but not in the sense we were before where we couldn't even begin to think about being a viable business. So this whole consolidation and mergers was about getting the industry well, and I found that
00:14:07
Speaker
I found that exciting, exhilarating, fulfilling, all those things, mainly because the people that work in those airlines, they're the ones that took the brunt of it all. You have a contract and all of a sudden you don't. You have a job, all of a sudden you don't by no, by none of your doing, simply because the company you work for isn't financially sound and the industry isn't financially sound. So yeah, no, anyway, I actually enjoyed it. So from 2012 through 2020,
00:14:35
Speaker
I guess the industry was, was doing well, was on the mend. You had scale competitors and it was a much better economic business than it had been. Oh,
COVID-19's Impact and Industry Adjustments
00:14:46
Speaker
absolutely. We were actually all, we were all nicely profitable through, you know, by the time we get the Americanized deal done in, um, 13, um, you know, 14, 15, 16, all through, you know, through 19, we were, we were producing beyond record profits for the industry. I mean,
00:15:04
Speaker
I actually near what normal business does. You might actually say it was fun. Exactly. It was getting there. I mean, the only the only thing that wasn't I'll tell you what's not fun is merging to airlines. So we had we had we did have to integrate. Since we've done that transaction in 13. We were doing a lot of integrating work between US Airways and American. So I wish we could have enjoyed that more. That's just a lot of systems integration and stuff that just you know, you're not really not really growing your integrating.
00:15:30
Speaker
But yeah, no, it was the business was a lot more fun. And we really had gotten to a point where we really had what felt like a real deal, which still does, by the way. Yeah. I know you're dealing with this. And yeah, because you're you're out of the woods. Right. You know, I used to talk to you regularly during this period. Things are chugging along.
00:15:48
Speaker
And then COVID hits and all of a sudden, by necessity, people can't fly and cashflow takes a turn. Just describe what you went through when COVID hit, how you thought about it and what that experience was like. Again, at 9-11, we talked about COVID was much worse from a financial perspective, very similar in that people wouldn't fly.
00:16:15
Speaker
but very different in how long it took for people to be comfortable flying. And so a much, much more deeper and longer period of financial duress than we went through, even with 9-11. And the entire industry was, this was, you know, 9-11 again, affected all of us, but some of us much more than others. In this case, everyone in the industry was,
00:16:42
Speaker
know, in a position of going to have to shut down if we didn't get some help. So we immediately went to working with the U.S. government to try and figure out a way that we could keep airlines flying because there was there was no chance or it made absolutely no sense to keep airplanes flying in that environment unless we could figure out a way to be incentivized to do so. What were the stages of going through the process of just getting people to fly again?
00:17:07
Speaker
Yeah, it's crazy how fast it all went. We were able to implement things, shields up at ticket counters. I mean, prior to 9-11, that stuff would have been some huge capital request and big long process. We were all just going full speed.
00:17:24
Speaker
doing everything we could because we needed to to convince people that it was safe to fly again. That included extensive cleaning of the aircraft. Remember early on, we all had a belief that it was COVID was transmitted through contact of surfaces. So we were cleaning off every surface.
00:17:42
Speaker
changing all of our procedures, boarding procedures, everything we could. It didn't really work. I mean, we got some people to start flying. But what we needed were vaccinations. And until the vaccinations started to come, it's when we really started to get people flying again. We tried everything we could. But we all, through 2020, were flying at most 40%, 50% of our airplanes. And those airplanes weren't particularly full. Now, where are you today in terms of capacity utilization?
00:18:11
Speaker
Our revenues are actually some 15, 20% higher than they were in 2019. And that's on seats, seats that are about 10% lower. And the only reason we're not flying all of our seats now is a different issue, which is the ability to get pilots trained fast enough to be able to fly all the airplanes we now have. So no, it's back. It's crazy how fast it came back once people could begin to fly, once people felt truly comfortable flying. And what'd you learn from that about human nature, people's desire to travel?
00:18:39
Speaker
you know, what it certainly says to us is, you know, early on in my career, we talked about travel as a, you know, kind of a discretionary spend, which of course it is in some sense, but it feels a lot less discretionary now. It feels like when people have, particularly when it's been pent up as badly as it was, that when people don't have the ability to get out and move around for an extended period of time, all they want to do is get out and move
Sustainable Future and Leadership Insights
00:19:04
Speaker
around. And I think it's helped people to appreciate
00:19:07
Speaker
the value of travel and the value of seeing the world, the value of seeing each other. Biggest issue that keeps you up at night today about the industry and the business? We're obviously prone to these kinds of shocks. And while we feel good about how we've built a business that can be long-term sustainable, there's certainly near-term effects that can still hit us. But look, I'm pretty bullish on the industry and where it is and where the future lies for it.
00:19:37
Speaker
I think we've done a really nice job of getting a business, making what was not a business a business now and putting it in a position where people that come and work for airlines know that they can work for companies that are going to be there as long as they want to be there, where I can really build careers. And that wasn't the case before. So I'm sleeping pretty well. So I'm going to shift gears here a little bit. And we'll talk a little bit more about reflections and some other issues that you faced.
00:20:04
Speaker
You just stepped down as CEO, you're now chairperson, chairman of American Air. It's just step back. What do you think makes a great airline CEO? What's in common, I think, is truly caring about the people that are in your care. As much as we talk about being a capitalized business and a service business, at the end of the day, it's a people business.
00:20:31
Speaker
We have over a hundred thousand people at American Airlines and their job is to go take care of other people. And the CEOs that understand that no one does understand that, but that's what they care about.
00:20:41
Speaker
Are the ones that I see that actually end up doing the best the ones that care about their team that tried to take care of their team first And that again, it's a business of some egos. There's no doubt about it when you when you drill into those egos they tend to When you talk to more they care about what they care about it is their team and their people
00:21:05
Speaker
And they're not dictators or anything close to it. They actually are leaders who are really good about having good teams of people who know how to go do their jobs and letting them go do it.
00:21:48
Speaker
I went to the funeral in San Antonio of Herb Kelleher, who was the very iconic CEO of Southwest Airlines. And as I go into the church, I noticed sitting in the front row was Doug Parker. And I know that Herb Kelleher was a mentor and a coach and a role model for you.
00:22:11
Speaker
Yeah, thanks. Herb's the best, the best of the best. I mean, when you talk about your own CEO, in my view, CEOs of anywhere in the United States, no one like him. I was fortunate enough to get to spend a good bit of time with Herb because he was nice to me in this whole story I've gone through. I never worked for Southwestern for Herb.
00:22:29
Speaker
Indeed, we were competitors, but from the time I became CEO of America West, you know, we'd have industry meetings, lobbying meetings, and Herb was always nice to me. And I just wanted to follow the guy around and learn from osmosis. So that's what I did. And we got to be good friends. And yeah, I mean, he's as good as they get.
00:22:51
Speaker
You know, I think back to, you know, this is all this of late talk about, you know, business roundtables mission on, you know, it's about not just thinking about just the shareholders, but all your constituents. And it's like, you've got you guys, did you not learn that before from Herb? Herb started with, you know, I take care of my team.
00:23:13
Speaker
They take care of the customer and the customer takes care of my shareholders. And he didn't just say that to say it. That's what he viewed his job as. His job is to take care of his team. He knew that would work. The organization is designed to make profits. What he needed to do is make sure that his team felt good about the company so that they take care of the customers. And that's what he spent his time doing. And he was fantastic. The other thing I'll tell you about Herb is
00:23:36
Speaker
He was the best listener I've ever seen, which I don't think people appreciate, because everybody that knows him knows what the great stories he told and how flamboyant he was. But if you were ever in a conversation with him, you were the only person there, no matter who you were. And he listened so intently. And that's how he learned. I just watched it happen. If you paid attention to the questions he was asking, they were all designed to help him learn more about the individual that would help him do a better job of taking care of him.
00:24:06
Speaker
And anyway, he's the best of the best. There's never been
Corporate Responsibility and Community Involvement
00:24:10
Speaker
anybody like him. I don't think there will be. We can all learn a lot from him. I know I did. And yeah, he's absolutely, anytime the question comes up of mentors of mine, Herb leads the list. So what's the biggest blind spot a CEO has that keeps them or vulnerability or issue that keeps CEOs from doing what you just talked about?
00:24:32
Speaker
You certainly can get yourself into a space where you're not hearing everything. But we did things like every month would go talk to pilots and flight attendants in training in a big room and just stay. We called it a crew news, but I would spend five minutes saying, here's going on the airline. And then it would just go to questions, anything you want. Those were fantastic. And we then film them and put them on there.
00:24:59
Speaker
Internet for people to look at and that was those were incredibly helpful to me. So yeah, I think if anything the answer that my question the answer that question for me would be you just need to get out and make sure you're talking to the people who are out there taking care of the customer and asking questions.
00:25:15
Speaker
Oh yeah, and letting them ask questions and listening. Yeah. I know you are very actively involved in the community and community involvement is very important to you. What's your philosophy of community involvement? I'm going to separate a little bit the company from personal. Yeah. But, you know, the company obviously has, I'm really proud of what American did and the steps we made.
00:25:35
Speaker
And it always, you know, we needed to our community involvement need to be tied to things that were important to American. It wasn't hard. I mean, we employ people from all walks of life, our customers are people from all walks of life. So we were ended up being supportive of, of all sorts of different organizations and causes. And we thought that was incredibly important to do. And the company still does. Personally, similar, my wife, Gwen and I,
00:26:03
Speaker
spend a lot of our time worrying about trying to do anything we can for those that aren't as fortunate as we have been, and trying to make sure that barriers to success are torn down as best they can be, and spend most of our time and effort working on initiatives in that regard. What would be your advice to other corporate leaders on what they should be doing and helping, as you said, with a broad list of constituencies, particularly their community? Yeah, look, I think corporate America is getting a lot better.
00:26:33
Speaker
But I think because we had to, and some still haven't gotten there, I think they eventually will. Again, so much of how much corporations need to be involved is dependent on how well our US government's doing it, making sure we're here people. But when we go through periods like we have over the last 10 years, where as the country becomes polarized, I think it's really important.
00:26:55
Speaker
That corporate America steps up like it has most not all but I think that's incredibly important because that's what corporations that's what business does You know, we bring people together. That's what CEOs are have to do Is bring people together not not pull people apart and we're writing at it
00:27:13
Speaker
And when it doesn't happen, that's not good for the country, that's not good for business.
Feedback, Criticism, and Leadership Philosophy
00:27:16
Speaker
And you owe it, I think, to not just the country, but your organization, to be out there talking and making sure that we point out the things that we're doing that really are disenfranchising some groups of people or pulling the country further apart and not together. How do you advise executives coming up to deal with criticism? Feedback is a gift. And if someone's giving you feedback, you should listen to it.
00:27:40
Speaker
And particularly if it's coming from the people you work for or people you respect, just as you would like to give good feedback to others, I try really hard to take that feedback and learn from it. But it depends on where it comes from, of course. I mean, you get feedback from all sorts of places these days. And if it's coming from some online sources, I would not get too upset about it.
00:28:10
Speaker
What I really think is, you know, be yourself, know yourself. And when you do that, you'll know when what you're hearing is, yeah, that resonates. I understand how what I did could be perceived that way, even though I don't agree with what I was doing. But I understand that that's how it came across. And I'm going to learn from that. So I think it's a real gift. And people that can give good feedback, by the way, are the best leader. How would you describe your leadership philosophy?
00:28:40
Speaker
I start with team. I grew up playing team sports. I love being part of teams. When my career started taking off, it's when I started leading people instead of being an individual contributor. I really like bringing teams of people together, diverse sets of people, getting them working together that complement each other and watching them learn how much more they can accomplish when they work together than they can when they work independently.
00:29:06
Speaker
So it's interesting that you talk about this because many people listening would say, boy, it sure sounds like that's what the country needs. It needs to be brought together and working more as a team. You're now chairman of American Airlines. What do you plan to do next out there given the huge role you could play in either our communities or in the country?
Future Plans and Nonprofit Endeavors
00:29:30
Speaker
My wife and I are working on starting up a nonprofit that I'm excited about that we're going to work to try and get some people who don't have the benefit of being able to pay for the training it takes to be an airline pilot to at least get the ability to do that.
00:29:47
Speaker
Um, um, so we're working through and I'm working through a number of things. Um, haven't, haven't really been bored yet. It's been whatever six, eight months. Um, and yet yet have found a day where I woke up and thought, what am I going to do today? So I'm still, I've still got, still got things, uh, that I'm working through. Um, and I'm not sure exactly where I'm going to be going from here. What advice would you give either to a, uh, a young person earlier in their career or a business or community leader about what they can personally do?
00:30:16
Speaker
to help improve their city, their state, and their country? That's a big question. Look, care for others. And get yourself in a position where what you're doing is for others. Back there, when we started this story, back in 9-11, I was a brand new CEO. We were going to liquidate. If we didn't get government support, that airline was going to. I found myself sitting in our first class seat, flying from Washington DC to Phoenix, thinking, well, it was me, because we've been told we weren't going
00:30:46
Speaker
Government loan and I'd gotten to where I was by worrying about my career. I'm not ashamed of that But you know, I did what I think a lot of people my age did which is I want that job with this job I'm gonna work hard. I'm gonna get myself promoted and I got myself to be the CEO of this small airline And we were gonna liquidate and I'm sitting there thinking oh my it's gonna look horrible on a resume I'm a 39 year old CEO, you know within months the airlines liquidated. What am I gonna do? Whoa is me?
00:31:12
Speaker
I knew I had to go back and talk to the flight attendant in the back. I did. She asked how it's going. I tell her it's not going that well. She says, what's going to happen? I say, if we can't get the loan, we're going to liquidate. And she looks at me and says, you can't do that. I said, well, I'm trying. She says, well, you can't let it happen. I'm a single mother. I've been doing this job for 15 years. I'm good at it. And she was. And I don't have anywhere else to go. You can't let that happen. And I'll tell you from that,
00:31:40
Speaker
I landed. On Monday, we went back to DC and said, here's another application. And they said, didn't you get the note where we said, we weren't going to prove this. We said, yeah, but you said at this time. So it's a new day. Here's a new application. We're not going away. And we didn't go away. And I'm telling you, from that time on, Rob, I never once thought about my career. And that's when my career really started taking off. Because all I was doing was working for people like that to get them into a safe harbor.
00:32:09
Speaker
So that's why we fought so hard for the US Airways merger. And that's why at US Airways, we fought so hard for the American merger. It was to go get those people into safe harbor, because that's what they deserve. And if you can find something like that, I mean, it's not easy, of course. But once I did, because it's easy to give up on yourself, I was going to be fine. But once I decided that what I'm doing is to take care of these people that are in my care, that are trusting me to make sure that they have a job, then my career
00:32:39
Speaker
did much bigger things than what otherwise. So long
Conclusion and Gratitude
00:32:42
Speaker
way of saying get yourself in a position where what you're doing is something that helps the greater good because that'll make you be much more certain that you're not going to give up on it. Doug Parker, thank you for your thoughts and your advice and your insights and thank you for your leadership. I enjoy talking with you today. Thanks, Rob. Always a pleasure.
00:33:09
Speaker
Next time on Move the Needle with Rob Kaplan. I have this bias to action. I want to like do things. I want to get things done. I want to change things. And from my point of view, that was not academia. After a super successful business career, Evan Marwell decided to get America on the education super highway. That's next time on Move the Needle with Rob Kaplan.
00:33:37
Speaker
Move the Needle with Rob Kaplan is produced and edited by Sam Zaff and Scott Richardson and I'm executive producer Renele Golden. We want to thank Michelle Brown as well as Zorik and his team from Hello Studios for logistical and technical support. Make sure not to miss an episode by subscribing to Move the Needle on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and the Robert Stephen Kaplan YouTube channel.