Word: burrs
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Buying Frontier puts People Express in a nose-to-nose confrontation with Continental, which has an important base in Denver. It pits Burr against a former colleague turned rival: Frank Lorenzo, the chairman of Continental's parent company, Texas Air. In the 1970s, before leaving to found People Express, Burr was Lorenzo's second in command at what was then called Texas International. The two men were once very close friends, but they now have colliding ambitions...
When Donald Burr was in high school, he told everyone he wanted to become a clergyman. Growing up in the 1950s in the tidy town of South Windsor, Conn., the boy saw his local Congregational church as the most admirable kind of organization. It was free and feisty, yet disciplined in its work. Burr instead embarked on a career that led him to found a free and feisty airline, People Express...
...manager, Burr has a penchant for delivering sermons to his flock on how to do a better job. He zealously believes that his populist, everybody-is-important organization can make a better world, or at least a better kind of capitalism. Says William Hambrecht, a San Francisco financier whose firm helped Burr raise $24 million to start the company: "Don Burr is really operating from a philosophical base, rather than a financial one. Monetary success is almost incidental. He's after much more than that...
...Burr's pulpit these days is an office at Newark Airport's North Terminal. On one side of the room, his windows overlook an arena-size lobby where thousands of passengers wait, eat, sleep and often grumble. Windows on the opposite wall face the runways, where People's jets streak skyward toward Los Angeles, London and 47 other destinations. Burr's office is bus-station Spartan, like his airline. In the place where a conventional executive's couch would sit, he has a row of three first-class seats from...
Since People's corporate structure is relatively free of middle managers, Burr is no remote Mr. Big to his workers. He sits down on a regular basis with all 1,000 of the airline's team leaders, about 20 at a time, in sessions that can run up to eight hours. All the while, Burr gulps coffee from a porcelain mug. "They think my meetings are too long," he says. "I like that. It means we go into detail." Burr first listens to their problems and ideas, but then he asks for the sky and the clouds. Says Burr: "This...