David Neeleman is playing an active and visible role on both fronts. He flies on a JetBlue flight at least once a week, serving drinks and snacks, talking to customers and crewmembers, and helping unload baggage. This helps him keep in touch with what it's like to be a JetBlue crewmember and customer. Neeleman also meets with every new flight attendant and pilot class, and once a month gives a business update at the company's home base at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York.
The meeting is videotaped and made available, unedited, on the company's internal web site so that all crewmembers can get the latest information straight from the top. He's meticulous about measuring the airline's performance, too. For instance, JetBlue tracks the time it takes to get the first bag and the last bag to the carousel for every flight (a metric Neeleman believes is used only by his airline). This is important, he says, because it's the last thing the customer will remember about their JetBlue experience.
"You have to be focused on these things every day, Neeleman says. "You can't lose sight of it. " He's still a man on a mission to continually improve the product, the JetBlue experience and he still has an uncanny ability to rally other people to that mission. But he also says he's not as hands-on as he used to be. He understands his role. "I'm not the guy to oversee the day to day," he says.
"That's Dave Barger. He loves that. I'm looking for the new deal, the new technology. My passion is making sure our product stays fresh and exciting and that we keep our costs low."Not day to day, perhaps.
But Neeleman can't resist checking, tweaking, reaching out. He logs on to the airline's Web site and books a flight to Buffalo to find out if the extra leg room is being promoted enough (it's not). He calls the operations department to find out what's being done for passengers on a plane that was struck by lightning and delayed for six hours (not enough). He also makes time to call a flight attendant he knows who collapsed on a flight the day before (she's fine).
