Fly American

Yesterday I (Jeff) was blessed to have an experience that let me "soar beyond my pay grade" for a little while. Through some networking at Kellogg, I was able to land a meeting with a person I've had on my "Famous People I'd Like To Share A Beer With" list: Gerard Arpey, CEO of American Airlines. So I jumped in my car at 3am, headed north to Milwaukee and caught the early flight to Dallas (Milwaukee simply because flights were half the cost of flying out of O'Hare...and double miles bonus!).

First, while many of you know that I can talk about the airline business and travel for endless hours, I realized that most of my questions about those issues would be wasted time, as I could find the answers online. So I formed a bunch of questions about stuff that I couldn't find in internetland: leadership. Boring, right? Not at all. We spent 2/3rds of the next hour talking about leadership and faith (!). Here's some selective takeaways from our time together, in random order:

• He is a big fan of Tim Keller, the pastor/author in NY, and highly recommended any of his books.
• His colleagues apparently dubbed him with his own acronym for leadership: WIDE (Wisdom, Integrity, Drive, Empathy)
• The entitlement mentality of many Americans is one of the most dangerous traps in society. Dangerous not just to our country, but to those people individually
  
• When asked about all of the attacks that come from being a prominent CEO, he said because of his faith: "the attacks affect me, but they don't move me."
• "You control the inputs in life. God controls the outputs." (Love this quote)
• His Christian faith/walk is the cornerstone of his leadership and he noted that he really does not understand how other people can carry on without this cornerstone
  
• He and his wife feel that God has called him to American Airlines to do what he's doing. As he noted, he could make a lot more money with a lot less headaches in another industry, but American is where he feels called to be
  
• He believes there is a high correlation between great companies and long-term consistent management (most of his senior management team has been working together at AA for 30+ years)
  
• Thinks we will see a global airline (i.e. someone like Star Alliance or oneworld becomes a single carrier) within his lifetime
• Thinks that with global growth, and the invaluable service that airlines provide, that somewhere down the road we'll see air travel demand explode globally
• Leadership is the same across industries and situations, only the business strategy differs
• Always try to do the right thing, there's a lot of gray out there, but always try to do the right thing (note: American is the only legacy carrier that hasn't declared bankruptcy, and Arpey has fought tooth and nail not to go this route despite the fact that all of their competitors have used this to reduce costs)

Bottom line: I have met and worked with a lot of C-suite executives in my day, and he really really impressed me. And based on my time with him and talking with a bunch of others, his attempt to walk in faith and do the right thing is obvious to many others. It always gives me hope to see and know that it's possible to follow Christ and lead a huge company. No person is perfect, but it's refreshing to observe authenticity and integrity when that's so hard to hold onto the higher you climb in the corporate world.

So let's all try to do the right thing, and fly American.