Word: burrs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Part of Burr's success has been his policy of cutting amenities: passengers must pay for any checked luggage, even for a cup of coffee (50 cents). As a result, he has kept costs down to a little over 5 cents per seat-mile, vs. an industry average of 8.5 cents. One key way of keeping those costs down is that Burr hires only "managers" (even a flight attendant is a "customer- service manager"), and all 4,000 full-time employees must move around in several different kinds of jobs. Burr occasionally takes his turn as a steward. Not only...
...This is not some old company refurbishing itself, it's a brand-new idea in brand-new clothes," says Burr. "This is not a social experiment. It's a hard-driving capitalist business. We want to maximize profits, and we want to do very well at that. But we can find a better way to do it, a way that is more friendly and more conducive to people getting out of life what the hell they're trying to get out of it. You don't just want to make a buck. You want people to become better people...
...Burr sounds like a combination of a choirmaster's son and a Harvard M.B.A., it is because he is both. His mother, who lives near Hartford, remembers him as "a very emotional boy with great faith." His older brother, an Air Force colonel, says their father's rule was: "There's nothing you cannot do, no task is impossible." Since boyhood, Burr has been interested in aviation; he became a Wall Street analyst of aviation stocks before he was 30, rescued and took over a nosediving airline, Texas International, before...
...Burr believes strongly in what he calls the perfection imperative, the desire to be better. He stopped smoking a year and a half ago; he trains for the marathon every morning; on his upcoming ski trip to Utah, his first extended vacation in five years, he plans to reflect on "life-style improvement to improve my efficiency...
Other corporations fail to follow Burr's lead, he says, because "they think humankind is lazy and bestial and won't do anything unless you beat them to death. We live with a 'boss' structure. But we've proved that if you give people space, room and freedom, you can get trustworthy behavior...