PIC No. 42:
• Title: Turnaround Time: Uniting an Airline and Its Employees in the Friendly Skies
• Authors: Oscar Munoz with Brian DeSplinter
• Publisher: Harper Business (May 2, 2023, 240 pages)
• Management Bucket #8 of 20: The Culture Bucket
Welcome to Issue No. 42 of PAILS IN COMPARISON, the value-added sidekick of John Pearson’s Buckets Blog. This blog features my “PICs”—shorter reviews of helpful books—with comparisons to other books in my 20 management buckets (core competencies) filing system.
Your First 37 Days as CEO
“Already a crisis, the incident was now spiraling out of control,” writes Oscar Munoz, who served as CEO of United Airlines from 2015 to 2020. “This is when the loneliness of the CEO becomes most acute. Even your closest colleagues are beginning to back away from you.”
Munoz—even today—regrets how he handled the PR disaster days after the April 9, 2017, incident. Smartphone videos went viral of a passenger (randomly chosen) who had refused all offers to rebook this sold-out flight. The videos (on TV and Twitter) broadcast “a violent incident showing airport law enforcement wrestling Dr. Dao out of his seat in the aisle and then dragging him off the plane, his glasses knocked from his eyes to below his nose, blood gushing from his face.”
Imagine! A few months earlier, Oscar Munoz had been named PR magazine’s “Communicator of the Year,” yet his initial response—“cold and clinical”—turned a crisis into a PR disaster, according to one news report.
That’s just one of 43 specific leadership lessons and insights I noted in this transparent, poignant, and powerful autobiography, Turnaround Time: Uniting an Airline and Its Employees in the Friendly Skies, by Oscar Munoz with Brian DeSplinter.
Really, John—43 leadership lessons? Really! Some leadership books give you 90 days to make a difference in a new position, but Oscar Munoz, United’s new CEO, received only 37 days initially. After a 5:30 a.m. five-mile run in Chicago’s River North neighborhood, he suffered a heart attack and endured a medically-induced coma at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. His wife was still at their home in Florida—and his unexplained absence from critical meetings at United that morning deeply troubled his team. Amazingly, Munoz is now a heart transplant survivor.
Michael Watkins, author of The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels, uses an acronym, “STARS,” to describes the four kinds of situations you’ll likely find when you accept a new position: Start-up, Turn-Around, Realignment, and Sustaining Success. He warns that a successful CEO of a Realignment may fail at a Turn-Around—and vice versa. When the United Airlines board asked one of their board members, Oscar Munoz, to become their CEO—his marching orders were clear: Turnaround. (Hence, his book’s title: Turnaround Time.)
Who should read this book?
• All leaders tasked with turnarounds.
• New CEOs and veteran CEOs who need a leadership refresher master class.
• Board members and senior team members.
What about those 43 leadership lessons? Honest—there are over 100 valuable lessons in this book, but I made notes on just 43. Similar to my review of Becoming Trader Joe (another fascinating CEO inside look), this book also delivers an uncanny breadth of leadership and management savvy across all 20 management buckets (core competencies). Examples:
THE MEETINGS BUCKET: Munoz instituted weekly meetings—with metrics. “I was also dismayed to learn that the most senior members of the company didn’t have a standing weekly meeting to discuss business results and metrics, progress on key strategic initiatives, and importantly, coordinate their efforts toward a common aim.”
(This reminded me of Alan Mulally’s early days at Ford. He introduced a “traffic light” system to weekly business performance reviews (BPRs) in which executives indicated progress on key initiatives with a “green, yellow, and red color-coding system.”)
THE CUSTOMER BUCKET: On his first United flight as CEO, he started a list, “The Top Ten Dumbest Things.” Talking obsessively with gate agents and flight attendants on his first 30 days of a “listening tour,” one response was a watershed moment. A teary-eyed flight attendant told him, “Oscar, I’m just tired of always having to say, ‘I’m sorry.’” (He built his motivational talks around that moment.)
THE STRATEGY BUCKET: An executive team (“E-Team”) offsite retreat hammered out competing strategy priorities (customers, operations, employees, Wall Street, etc.). Guided by a strategic advisory firm, Munoz wanted 100% buy-in from his team on where they would land.
COMMUNICATIONS: His PR firm created a 90-day plan and helped them launch “United Airtime,” a digital platform for both passengers and employees to “air” their criticisms. One stunner response: “I felt like an inconvenience, not a customer.”
CULTURE: Whew! Continental merged with United in 2010, but it took eight years to integrate the union contracts and cultures. (United folks referred to their new associates as “ex-Cons.”) Yikes!
BUDGET: In the fascinating chapter, “New Flight Plan,” Munoz delivers “a short primer on how airlines actually make money.” Using a hypothetical flight of 100 passengers, at the time it required 29 people just to pay for the gas. During the turnaround days, the margins were thin: just the 100th passenger “would represent pure profit for the airline.” (Can you explain your organization's expense side in simple terms?)
Gratefully, this autobiography skips the frequent page-filler traps of less humble CEOs. At times, the book reads like a James Bond novel. Will he survive? What happens next? Wow—why would anyone want to be an airline CEO? In between the crisis moments, Munoz artfully weaves in fascinating doses of his background and formative years, including his grandmother, Mama Josefina, who raised him in Mexico until he met his mother at age 10 in Los Angeles. Mama Josefina, his role model, then worked as a housekeeper at a Las Vegas hotel chain until she retired at age 86! She modeled for him, “To lead is to serve.”
Maybe because I’ve lived near two United Airlines hubs (Chicago and L.A.), I was a loyal fan of the friendly skies. According to my MileagePlus account, I’ve flown 730,000 miles on United. I’ve prayed for every pilot on take-offs and landings! Ironically, my wife and I were on United when we arrived back in the U.S. from a South American vacation on March 10, 2020 (thanks to frequent flier miles). The next day, March 11, 2020, WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic. Whew! Just made it back!
In his riveting chapter on COVID, Munoz—then just two months before his baton handoff to his successor in May 2020—shares the fascinating inside info (White House meetings and more) on those rare moments when airline CEOs (aka competitors) worked together to keep planes flying during COVID. Oh, my.
You’ll also appreciate learning what you should do when you feel “weird,” and why you should call 911 immediately. A doctor’s earlier counsel saved Oscar Munoz's life. His story (and his physical pain) reminded me of university president Mark Smith’s story, Oh God, I’m Dying!
THE BOARD BUCKET: There are ample board governance insights. Today, Munoz serves on USC's board and other boards. (His story as an unlikely USC student is inspirational. He was the first college grad in his family. His experience also informs his heart for workplace diversity.)
THE CRISIS BUCKET: With apologies to Oscar Munoz, I can’t resist mentioning another PR disaster (2009, prior to Munoz’s CEO stint) when another unfortunate customer service story went viral and became an MBA case study! “United Breaks Guitars” is described in Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s book, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World. (Read my review and view the video!) And click here for the guitar player’s commentary on the 2017 incident.
YIKES! Think your job is challenging? Try navigating the daily perils of an airline CEO’s role: unions, weather delays, and more. And on any given day, the possibility of emails from more than 90,000 employees! Oh…and a YouTube video that goes viral and now has more than 22 million views. Did I mention, “Yikes?”
PAILS IN COMPARISON: Reading this book reminded me of several other must-read books in the Culture Bucket and the Crisis Bucket, plus other buckets/core competencies. If you love CEO autobiographies, you'll appreciate these niche books:
[ ] Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys, by Joe Coulombe with Patty Civalleri. (Read my review.)
[ ] Made From Scratch: The Legendary Success Story of Texas Roadhouse, by Kent Taylor. (Read my review.)
[ ] Oh God, I’m Dying! How God Redeems Pain for Our Good and for His Glory, by Terry Powell and Mark Smith. (Read my review.)
BONUS! Here are three more leadership/management books, also with Chicago connections. (United's offices are in Chicago, the city where I endured 21 winters!)
[ ] The Cubs Way: The Zen of Building the Best Team in Baseball and Breaking the Curse, by Tom Verducci (Read my review.)
[ ] Culture Is the Way: How Leaders at Every Level Build an Organization for Speed, Impact, and Excellence, by Matt Mayberry. (Read my review.)
[ ] A Game Maker's Life: A Hall of Fame Game Inventor and Executive Tells the Inside Story of the Toy Industry, by Jeffrey Breslow with Cynthia Beebe. (Read my review.)
To order from Amazon, click on the title for Turnaround Time: Uniting an Airline and Its Employees in the Friendly Skies, by Oscar Munoz with Brian DeSplinter. Listen on Libro (9 hours, 7 minutes). And thanks to the publisher for sending me a review copy. For more book reviews, visit John Pearson’s Buckets Blog and subscribe to Your Weekly Staff Meeting.
© 2023 John Pearson Associates. All rights reserved.
Pails in Comparison is posted every once in a while. We do not accept any form of compensation from authors or publishers for book reviews. As an Amazon Associate, we earn Amazon gift cards from qualifying purchases. As a Libro.fm Affiliate, we earn credits. By subscribing to Your Weekly Staff Meeting, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing. Learn more about Typepad.com’s privacy policy here.