Word: neeleman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...gone by 1987, another example of a great concept that could not be sustained by the folks who got it off the ground. That's not going to happen to JetBlue. On Thursday the airline's board of directors pulled the ripcord on JetBlue's founder and CEO, David Neeleman in the wake of February's epic meltdown, in which a winter storm left thousands of passengers stranded. Some sat in JetBlue planes at JFK for up to 8 hours. You don't do that in a city where people get ticked off if a subway is delayed...
...board believed it was time to get the company in the hands of a first-class operations guy, Dave Barger, the COO. Barger has proven ops chops, having helped turn Continental around. (Although he certainly has to take some blame for February, too.) In some ways, dumping Neeleman isn't a surprising move. He's a great entrepreneur, but perhaps one of those types who is much better at innovating than operating. The skill sets are vastly different, and many entrepreneurs get bored by running a company and tend to step aside and move onto the next business once...
...Neeleman has been justly praised, in TIME and elsewhere, for brilliantly formulating JetBlue's strategy and getting it off the ground. You'd be surprised how easy it is to start an airline in the U.S. (Unless your name is Virgin America and the industry freaks about the prospect of a Richard Branson-linked competitor entering the domestic industry.) There are plenty of planes to lease, and loads of pilots to fly them. And that's exactly why hundreds of airline start ups have sprung to life and augered in since the industry was deregulated...
...David Neeleman's weeklong media apology tour took the JetBlue CEO from the Today show to David Letterman to Anderson Cooper to beg forgiveness for the popular airline's Valentine's Day debacle. The company had stranded more than 100,000 travelers after bad weather decimated its operating ability--in one case JetBlue passengers were left on a snowed-in runway for more than nine hours. Neeleman's mea culpa reached its apogee with a series of full-page national-newspaper ads: "Words cannot express how truly sorry we are for the anxiety, frustration and inconvenience that you, your family...
...enough to assure consumers that they should continue using your product," says Mike Sitrick, who has advised such p.r.-challenged celebrities as Rush Limbaugh, Tommy Lee and Halle Berry. He gives JetBlue a B--. Eric Dezenhall, co-author of a new book on crisis management, gives Neeleman an A for taking responsibility for the mess but says JetBlue could have done better in helping the trapped passengers...