#129—Oscar Munoz: United's Strategic Revival Through Employee Empowerment

Oscar Munoz, is the former CEO and Chairman of United Airlines. Oscar has led an accomplished career, spanning senior financial positions at Coca-Cola, Pepsico, AT&T, and US West. He also served as President and COO of North American rail-based transportation giant CSX Corp. He is also an independent trustee for Fidelity and a CNBC Contributor. 

A first-generation college graduate with degrees from the University of Southern California and Pepperdine, he was twice honored by Hispanic Business Magazine as one of its ‘100 Most Influential Hispanics’, honoring his journey as an immigrant who is the first person of Hispanic heritage to run a U.S. airline.  

In this conversation, we get to glean Oscar’s incredible insights from his Wall Street Journal best-selling memoir, Turnaround Time: Uniting an Airline and its Employees in the Friendly Skies. Having joined United, he had quite a task ahead of him, uniting the very fragmented workforce the airline faced at the time.  At the core of this immense turnaround was Oscar’s steadfast belief, that employees are as important as customers and shareholders in ensuring a business succeeds. 

In this podcast we discuss: 

• His journey throughout his career that brought him to United, and the insightful takeaways on leadership he gleaned along the way  
• His human-first approach in taking over the reins, which put each and every employee at the core of United transformation 
• The Core4 policy that emphasizes each employee operate by the four pillars of safe, caring, dependable and efficient, emphasizing the human part of customer service over business objectives 

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Episode Timeline:
00:00—Highlight from today's episode
01:14—Introducing Oscar+ the topic of today’s episode
04:45—If you really know me, you know that...
05:52— How Oscar's core values were shaped
07:32—What is your definition of strategy
13:11—Oscar gives insights into how he became CEO of United
19:22— Oscar steps into the CEO role
24:12— Economic factors shaping airline strategy
26:58—The Core4 policy as a strategy for growth
35:12— Bottom-up leadership: building a company from the employee level 
38:10—How can people follow you and continue learning from you?

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Additional Resources:
Personal website: oscar-munoz.com
Link to book: Turnaround Time
Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/oscarmunozua
Instagram: www.instagram.com/oscarmunoz

Thank you to our guest. Thank you to our executive producer, Karina Reyes, our editor, Zach Ness, and the rest of the team. If you like what you heard, please follow, download, and subscribe. I'm your host, Kaihan Krippendorff. Thank you for listening.

Follow us at outthinkernetworks.com/podcast

Transcript

Kaihan Krippendorff: Oscar, thank you so much for taking the time to be with us. I know it's been quite a bit to get you on the podcast. I know you're busy, and I really appreciate you spending time to talk.
 
 Oscar Munoz: Oh, listen. As everyone says, thanks for having me. But I really appreciate the organization and the people that listen to this with your strategy folks, and they're an important part of business community. And I like the other concepts that you have with people, lifelong learners, you know, that that kind of concept humble enough because strategy is such an intelligent sort of function but getting beyond the academics and the intellectual capacity, the human aspect that is really important. And, hopefully, we'll talk about that a lot today.
 
 So Yeah.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Yeah. No. What and listening and read listening to and reading your book, like, kind of what I really appreciate is this connection between strategy and people that you are able to kind of bridge, and so I'm very excited to talk about those 2 and the connections. Yep. I'm gonna ask 2 questions that I always ask all of our guests and people who listen to this regularly know those 2 questions. The first 1 is just to get us know you a little bit more personally. If you could complete the sentence for me, if you really know me, you know that.
 
 Oscar Munoz: Ugh. That is a great question. You know, the desire to fill you in with all the wonderful extra curriculars that I do is a natural answer with regards to how I grew up in the water. I'm a surfer, and it is just 1 of my wonderful quiet moments that I have. And so I really love that, but probably more pertinent to us as humans is that I am fiercely protective of my personal relationships.
 
 I nurture them. And once you're in that inner circle, I just, like, cherish that so much and not just with people that I've known all my life, but as I meet new people, it just I love the human connection that you have. And back to this concept of learning, this is not a timber person in the world that I can't talk to, that I walk away with something. You know what? That is a different perspective, a wonderful perspective, and I learned from that. So it would be those thousands.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: And where do you think that comes from? Is it family upbringing or not?
 
 Oscar Munoz: Hundred percent. You know, I you know, my answer could have been I'm kind of an open book, and I just wrote a book which puts, you know, exposes out to those things. But in it, I speak about some of my early beginnings and spending all of my first 8 years of my life with my maternal grandmother south of the border where I was born to a single mother. And so many so much of my time there at this formative part of my life, you know, as being as being young, but she has left so many what I would call late in our dormant values about human kindness, empathy, turning the other cheek, work ethic, just this is a person that did not work. No.
 
 It didn't have a job, didn't have an education. She didn't have a home, but we had our family, family, and that part of the world that we could always be connected with. But those early moments, I reflect on who she was as a human being and just these personal dynamics that we all strive for personally, and we would love for others into. But, you know, as I've all the issues that I've gone through ups and downs is I sort of think back of where did that come from to your very question. It's like it came from that upbringing, my heritage, and, you know, family and the Spanish language many languages.
 
 Right? It has a deeper resonance than just, you know, simple concept of family. So I I think that's where I get it. It's that concept of heritage and that people put your product, which we're most of us is where we get it from, and I truly value that. And I think, you know, I think about her often, and it's what she would do.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Amazing. She's no longer with us, it sounds like. No.
 
 Oscar Munoz: She passed away at a right page of 96.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Wow. Amazing. The podcast about strategy, so I just wanna ask you first, what is your definition of strategy?
 
 Oscar Munoz: Well, you've written about this as probably every academic and person and business person in the world. And so it's a tightly, hardly contested. Oh, I can't imagine. Yep. You have a million different views.
 
 And my answer is as I speak about it. It truly I think from my perspective, it depends on what your environment is and what I like to say, especially in a, like, a turnaround situation, but any situation, it's not necessarily figuring out what to do because we're all smart. All of you that do this for a living, you understand the concepts, and you work with many people. But it's, I think, bigger and out what to do first. What is the platform from which everything else is gonna build?
 
 And for me, you know, how do you get to that first step? And in my world, in the course of what I what has been dubbed the listening tour, you know, I went out and talked to a lot of folks at the lowest levels of our organization. 2, not I had my ideas, but how to grow the business that, you know, growth is everything from my perspective in a straight and strategic world. But we're also the friendly skies, and we were bailing at all of those things in the marketplace. Everyone was pissed at us.
 
 And so rather than come up with my own thoughts about what we needed to do, which I had in my head, I get back to my heritage and upbringing, my grandmother and other things this concept of you know what? Before I answer those questions, let me go out and find out for the people that actually, you know, do the work every day. We had 8 CEOs in the previous 10 years, so my instinct was these people have been there's and to your point earlier, there's been 8 humans leading this from that have told them what strategy is all about. So they've lost you know, they've become disengaged and disillusioned, and so it's something to be disenfranchised from all of that. So what I went out and my listener and found out is, you know, the concept back to your concept of what is strategy.
 
 I mean, I think strategy is culture. And in my experience, again, it depends. My listening to her showed me that until we fixed that very broken culture of so many different leaders with so much different direction, any strategy wouldn't have a solid base to group on. And so, you know, I think, Josh, was it I AEs and Howard said, but there's that famous saying. Right?
 
 Culture eats strategy for breakfast, and I think we all know that. And then and so I'm trying to remember the exact phrase from Eisenhow what yeah. It's a amateur's talk strategy and professionals sort of, you know, execution logistics. Right? So and so I to all do deference to the God that won a World War for.
 
 That's right. So clearly, amateur's can't talk strategy, but professionals like all of you and us could talk about culture because culture is strategy. And when I took over United, again, my listening to her showed me all that and I needed to fix what was first, and what I learned and what came out of it was that we needed to regain the trust of our employees. Not our customers, not our best of which were also part of the but as I spoke to these people, a 1 on 1, 1 on 2, because an airline doesn't have a central floor where you can speak to 90000 employees.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Sure. They're dispersed in lots of places.
 
 Oscar Munoz: My thought on, again, the strategy the fact that it depends is know, what is it that you wanna start with first, and how do you get to that point? And, you know, people do surveys and focus groups for me in a world where we need it to exemplify the friendly skies which is our tagline. And the fact that they had 8 people before me who they didn't like or trust, I felt the need. And, again, it was my own personal approach and style. Again, I build relationships that I love doing that.
 
 It's my that is my attribute to the world as I like do that. And so I went out and listened, and a lot of specific things came up, but mostly I got the sense of, like, oh my god. We have lost this very large employee base no matter what we decide to do strategically. They're not dealing part of it. So for all of you out there, and it's a hard thing to convince your leaders to do sometimes because it's not easy, and you have to do it in a genuine fashion that people that are talking to you actually there's a phrase that trust travels at the speed of transparency.
 
 And so my vulnerability in talking with folks was just 1 on 1. I would find you in a middle of a break room at, you know, and this is the tramortization at 02:00 in the morning, and I would sit down and find some connective tissue when I saw you whether it's your lanyard or a button about your family or the shoes you there was there's always something that shows another human being that you actually give a hoot about you talking to them. It's like, alright. Well, I'm the CEO and look at all these people with cameras, and look at me being 1 of your part of the tea. Right?
 
 People see through that. It's kind of a politician's world that you're we see those pictures. It's like, oh, sure. Sure. You were cooking French fries, but don't.
 
 To use a bit. Not a political statement. Just and so you know, we I really felt that we needed to win back our employees, and then the difficult process starts right execution. Strategy fails, not because it's not a brilliant strategy. We can come up with really incredible presentations.
 
 It's it it it fails because you don't have a simplistic approach that touches on with the frontline folks about the things they need to get done. And so from our perspective, we needed to put some simplistic things and some trust back into the system. And then whatever we both had, honestly, they all felt like they were part of it. Even though the actual strategies that came out had nothing necessarily to do with anybody's statement, they could all resonate with it. And that ladies and gentlemen is not an easy task.
 
 And if you wanna read more about it, read the book because it's 2 or 3 chapters about how the process came about. But that's my long winded.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Yeah. That's yeah. That's great. I wanna get us into that those first few days or that first 90 days or whatever that is. And I do wanna lead to we're kind of in the middle point just like we're gonna talk a little bit about the economics of the industry and how that creates this this dilemma of whether to contract and increase profits or to grow, and you saw the opportunity to grow.
 
 So I wanna go there. But before we go there, maybe you could just bring us into, like, the first few days. You are at CSX. You are, I believe, the CFO.
 
 Oscar Munoz: No. I was on the post president and COO. Weeks from being announced as the next CEO. Right. Weekues, and you're on the board.
 
 That is worth that is worth reading for folks listening about how you make a business to say a personal career decision about you have all of this. You have 1 giant thing in the hand, and then this United thing is, like, 2 in the bush kind of big. And you're like, how do you make that decision? My personal journey, I think. Because it's interesting to listen.
 
 Nothing else, because we all face that decision.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Yeah. So tell us about that decision. I mean, you had taken out of the room with the board at United because you are considered a potential next CEO. Right? And you're facing these 2 amazing choices.
 
 Oscar Munoz: Yeah. It's it was a So it was a timeline. Right? We had a situation developing with our existing CEO that I won't describe, but it was not as soon as I heard, I was chair of the audit committee. So as soon as I got the first call that something's brewing, my first instinct, literally, the quote to our general counsel, was we need to start looking for a new CEO.
 
 Like, with no intent, no anything. The next call I get is from a special committee of the board that's convening without me. Say, hey. Listen. In doing that very thing, it would be for a new person.
 
 Your name came up and you're on the list and just checking in with you to see if you had any interest whatsoever. And my immediate answer was, no. Thank you. We were running a very successful business. We had transformed it.
 
 Won a bunch of awards for the success. We had at CSX with the team that I was part of.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: May maybe just describe what CSX is for those who
 
 Oscar Munoz: don't Yeah. It's our global logistics company, more formally known as a railroad, a freight railroad company on the east part of the United States, heavy union, heavy investment infrastructure, very old, hundred 20 plus year industry, again, very asset heavy, and b to b. So you know, we move coal and steel and feed for animals and wheat and automobiles. So not a sexy industry, but 1 we took from a 7000000000 market cap to almost a 70000000000 market cap. So for all of you, strategy, like, all the stuff that I talk about, I always punctuate what the economics and value derive from my approach because that's the important part.
 
 But yeah. So I'm at CSX doing this. We're doing fine. I'm on the board of the airline. Where we're making minimal margins.
 
 Right? You know, sub 10, you know, single digit margins hit on a good year, and we're making literally almost 55 0 percent margins in the world that we built at the railroad. So when you're comparing these things, it's like, wow. Get off. Right?
 
 Yeah.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Where do you wanna go? Go where the margin is.
 
 Oscar Munoz: So we're going to so my initial thought is, like, now listen. I'm part of this team and being considered as part of this, you know, this succession practice. Just really a matter of time. So that's a situation. If the summertime till the summer rolls around and towards the end of the summer, the conversation from the United board becomes a little more sort of focused.
 
 It's like, ask me, you know, we really need to know whether or not you'd be interested because We have vetted other people, gone to a search process, but really think that that the rest of the board in working with you throughout these years, we really think that, you know, you would be a great candidate. And so then the process becomes, you know, internal to yourself you have to make a decision. Right? These are these business and personal decisions when there's no 1 else around. So you can read all the books about this.
 
 You can talk to a thousand different people. At the end of the day, I always say, you have to know yourself. Like, what motivates you, what drives you, what does it that you really want to do? Not what people not what people want you to do, or not what you want others to think of you. Right?
 
 Sometimes we put on a facade because we wanna become a process smart and thoughtful. We wanna make the right decisions, but blah blah blah. It's like, wow. We have to know yourself. And that's an unfettered truth that only a couple of people probably in your life can help you with.
 
 Usually, it's your partner who you've known for a long time or a very dear and close family or friend who can tell you it's like, you're so full of crap when you say that. You know that. Right? And so that concept to know myself, why do I do best? I fix things.
 
 Not quite a turnaround sprint, but I did. In my career, I always took things that were broad. And more than problem solving, it's like solution long term solution solving where people align, building bridges between very different viewpoints. So it's a slightly different take on that.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Well, yeah. I think it's I think what I'm also hearing what you're saying is I think that, like, strategy is so much about people and a solution that is technically correct is that is worthless unless people are involved. So people are part of the human side is part of the problem solving problem.
 
 Oscar Munoz: Hundred percent. And so that and you have to you have to take that important act you know, this really intelligent business strategy and distill it for the lowest common denominator and do that. And we can talk about that quickly. Let me just quickly the story of the thing. Knowing myself and what I wanted, the thing presented in front of you was difficult, very unclear about success.
 
 In an industry, while I was on the board, I wasn't part of the industry. Right? I was part of my industry. I knew the people. I knew the and so making that decision was a difficult 1.
 
 But at the end of the day, I just felt I had my own turnaround, and it wasn't a self aggrandizing sort of adulation sort of oriented. Like I knew I could do this, and I wanted to prove to myself. And so going in to talk to my boss who has been so supportive, who has championed me to take his role. We are the eleventh hour on this thing, and I'm walking in. And I remember my first words were you're gonna be severely disappointed at me and to tell them what that.
 
 So as a meaningful thing. So
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: so at the end of the day, you debate this, you decide United is the next place for you. 1 of my favorite chapters in the book, I think it's called there's room in here, and you talk about that first day.
 
 Oscar Munoz: The elevator story.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: The elevator. If you don't mind, I don't I don't wanna, like, set you up to directly, but I would I think people would love hearing that first day at the office.
 
 Oscar Munoz: And 2 things. And this is helpful to all of you as you enter new role, new departments, how you approach both that that initiative because as you know, and all of us have been part of management changes and when a new boss comes in, everybody is on high alert. Like, what's she like? You know what? What are they gonna do?
 
 I've heard this or this. And so how do you set that record straight? So before the story we're about to tell that you're referenced to, there's also an earlier note When all the decisions have been made, I'd signed up, and we are ready to go, and we were writing and penning the note announcing this. It had been done by an outside agency, and it read like trash. Like, blah blah blah.
 
 And, again, this is back to what we do with strategists. Understand your culture and environment. I knew enough of the people through my board seat, but not all of them. I knew that I had 8 CEOs before me. So they've gotten 8 of these letters in the last 10 years, and this has just sounded just like all the other letters.
 
 So I took that a
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: little bit let me I was gonna push you just a little bit on that. What I'm understanding is the letter also didn't admit anything that the company had gotten wrong or any disappointments that had made. There was it was sort of like a continuation of
 
 Oscar Munoz: Yeah. It was oh, yeah. Hey. Look, another person taught me, and here's this person. And from outside the industry, yes.
 
 I'm on the board, but, you know, most employees don't know what a board is to begin with, honestly. So it you had to introduce yourself. And, again, back to my secret sauce or, you know, you know, put how do you build relationships? So that initial letter went through all you just said. It's like, listen.
 
 We have faced difficult times. You have faced multiple levels of leadership. You need to know about who I am and what I believe in and how important bring bringing back the spirit of the friendly skies, bringing back your input I am gonna be out there, and I'm gonna reach out. And it was brilliantly worded not because I wrote all of it, but I had the help of 1 of my fellow board members, guy named Walter Isaacson who also writes books.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: And he wrote the yes. Right. So, of course. And he wrote the introduction over the forward, I think, as well
 
 Oscar Munoz: to the Yes. He did. He was kind enough to do that. And so that initial letter was the first sort of shot. And interesting in hindsight, a lot of people knew me from that because that letter you might imagine, in any organization, begin to travel around very quickly because it's like, this just feels and sounds differently.
 
 So to your question about that first day, there's room in here. We are at the Law Offices of the early morning, and while you've been through this drama, where the secret is being announced. All the right people are being contacted before. I've been major opening so that there's no fusion to street bankers on the press. Everybody's everybody's scared to do this.
 
 And so I leave the office, and there's a black car waiting for me and which was, like, I'm just ready to walk. It's 3 blocks to the office from the office from the office, and it's like, no. You gotta get in this car. Right? It's my first thing.
 
 It's like, I wanna fight that. Somebody went somebody told me it's like, Oscar, just shut up a bot. Just get in the car. Okay? Just accept what people are doing for you because when you don't, you actually make it harder for us.
 
 You don't do that. I was like, alright. So I got in the car. And then in our office in Chicago, there's a very private parking area for, you know, the senior officers with sort of private access to your offices. And so the driver, Margaret, knew this route because she had you know, she drove in for my predecessor.
 
 So we started going back. I said, but I said, wait. The front lobby is right there, and I just stop. And she's like, well, that's not where normally people go. It's like, Well, this is where it's all gonna start.
 
 This is back to
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: normally, we're a senior executive.
 
 Oscar Munoz: Yeah. It's all and then I have a phrase called proof not product. It's like, you know, so I'm gonna walk in the front door. And just as this news is breaking, you know, throughout everywhere, including in our offices,
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: because people don't know yet. No. They haven't gotten the email.
 
 Oscar Munoz: No. He's just not supposed
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: to be
 
 Oscar Munoz: This is Monday. Tuesday morning because that's after a holiday. This is Tuesday morning after a holiday, but it's just coming back to work. And so all of a sudden, it's like, oh my god. This announcement, and my letter is reaching out and all that I go and I go to the elevator bank and just get in with everyone else.
 
 And literally, as I'm in now, we're, you know, we're a we're a high up floor, don't everybody's phone as they eat. Anybody's looking is like and then they'll almost send out because my mug is is flaster on this, like and they're all, like, great
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: face and they elevate it with us.
 
 Oscar Munoz: And I smile. I said, yeah. That's me. And I think my phrase was, you know, you're you're gonna hopefully gonna see a lot of me. And, again, it's the little things, right, that make an eventual strategy thing.
 
 These you begin to regain sort of a sense of trust with all of these folks. And it's like, you know, this person is different to a degree.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: That's awesome. Yeah. I wanna get back to the people and the culture, but I think it'd be helpful right, to anchor it first in the strategy. And, of course, there's a whole another big side not side, but, you know, parallel story about your health condition, which but that's I mean, that's and then and then COVID and the rest but I'll just dig down a little bit into the strategy. Here's what I'm I just wanna have people understand who aren't in the industry, understand what the economics are. If a hundred there's an Oliver Wyman study that you reference, and if you have a hundred people in an airplane 29 cover the cost of gas, 20 the cost of salaries, 16 ownership, 14 taxes, 11 maintenance, 9 miscellaneous, and so it's really that 1 hundredth customer that either makes or breaks the airline, and that this leads to this focus on the cost of available seat mile and revenue of available seat mile. And a great way to reduce that or to improve your profit per available seat mile is to just have fewer flights and fewer planes and fewer.
 
 And so that is a way that's kind of a short term way. To just take us into that dilemma, that catch point too, that gourd knot, gourdian knot as you put it.
 
 Oscar Munoz: Sure. As we all know, strategically, when you're following up the world, your competitors are right behind you, rooting you on. Right? So in this quest to, you know, a chasm, the cost per available is to bring that down. Right?
 
 Easier thing those are easy things to do. It's easy to cut people, easy to cut cost. But how do you improve the revenue per so you've got it in our world because of the economics you outlined, it rose and volume makes a lot of sense. And so, yeah, over the so growth was we were shrinking to greatness, blindless to different people because of the cost that we were shrinking our aircraft to those really uncomfortable 50 and 75 seaters that all of us have blown in. While our competitors are watching all this happen, it's like, you know what?
 
 It just gives us more impetus to put bigger, nicer aircraft, more frequency between business locations. Because you know what? United Travelers, however loyal they are, they gotta get tired of getting those little in those little planes. So that's the development that we had. We held this notion that we were still charging more for our seats and holding a premium on our revenue, which I guess at the metric, but why is charging more for, in essence, a subpar product going to work out for you in the long term.
 
 So this is back to my knowledge of this walking into this was great. But how do you change that? Right? How do you fix that? So those are the economics to answer your question, and that was the difficult deal facing.
 
 This is do you go by and do that business strategy?
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: And if you can add more of these smaller routes, the smaller routes that will feed into the hubs, that'll create greater connectivity. But the market, the Wall Street is looking at you and thinking you're gonna reduce profitability for available seat mile. How did you sort of who do you have to convince that this kind of lean into growth strategy was the right strategy, and how did you do that?
 
 Oscar Munoz: Well, that was so that that was the nut. Right? How do how do you as an outsider to the industry with only, you know, sort of, to function, awareness, and knowledge of true network strategy in this business? Those were all the questions I lied. Questions I did not have the necessary answer to.
 
 Up to your point, this feeding area of smaller aircraft beating into bigger cities where our hubs are so that we can fly internationally where we make, you know, more of our margin and money. All sounded well, other than the fact that we were flying to many different places internationally that everyone else didn't. So, again, a fundamentally wrong thing. It's like, well, all of you fly to London. And But I have to take a crummy plane from a small city to get to your hub where I can take a better plane to say, but it still gets to London, and then, oh my god, you charge more for that process.
 
 So all of those things had to be fixed now. So you have that situation. And so, of course, we have to build what is indeed a complex strategy to, you know, regain market share, certainly regain our customers, grow this network, and all of that all of that had to be done to some degree. So but that's a thousands of ideas. And to your point, what do you how do you distill all of that into something that the global workforce that's kind of dis disengaged and disenfranchised and disillusioned from us?
 
 How do we capture them? And so that's why I said, I I there's a reason why we're not doing this, and I don't know what that reason is. It could be their strategies. It could be our network people. Or the friendly skies is another sort of what's different for us than any other airline is that tagline.
 
 Right? That expectation? Like, how do you get rid of that? I mean, it's like, you know, at 1 point in time, our team said, well, maybe we should change that because it's just too high a standard. Right?
 
 The friendly skies, the definition of friendly, it's just too broad and great in today's social media world, all that. And in so again, being the thoughtful leader that I am, I say, tongue in cheek. It's like, that'd be great. Don't you guys take a little bit of time? Go figure out what our new nay what our new tagline should be.
 
 Knowing that's like, how do you go back how do you walk back the friendly skies? Right? Well, we're gonna be friendly, but only on Tuesdays and Thursdays, or we're gonna be not as friend so they came back, you know, tails between their legs. Like, no. Rather than lower our standards, why don't we live up to our standards?
 
 And back to this complex business strategy that we've just been discussing, how you do that is through the humans that are employed that are distributed in nature have an individual decision to make every day, every interaction they have with it with a customer, whether they wanna put friendly in it, or they are so disengaged that I could care less. How do you recapture them? Was an instinct that made me say in an earnings call when they asked, what are you gonna do? I said, I don't know yet, which, you know, watching the Bloomberg screen, you saw this big plummet Azat, we know we knew he didn't know what he was doing. And then I said, I'm gonna go out and listen to all these folks, which also infuriated Wall Street because it's like, what the hell is that?
 
 Like, this just this just totally doubles down on this. This guy doesn't know anything that the first person he's gonna ask is somebody that throws bags down there or turns a ranch or punches into your stuff into a computer, and we had to come up with something in that regard. So long, you know, story about the listening tour and all that came up and all that. But to all of you, strategist, after all of this complicated conversation we've been having, we distilled this basic need of trying to get our employees behind us. How do we send we need to grow because the economics are better.
 
 Doesn't resonate with somebody that's making union wages just taking care of their people. Right? So we broke it down to, hey. How do we bring friendly package on the same thing? So we all of this got distilled in something that we called core 4.
 
 The 4 c's. It was they well, it wasn't 4 c's. It was gold 4 4. Save, carrying, dependable, and efficient. Right?
 
 Just words, safe is obviously, right, dependable, and efficient, and carry. Caring was an important key because it burst all common sense aspects of an of running an airline. We run because of the economics you discussed and introduced earlier, we run on tight margins. So we need to be on time on process, any wasted minute, any wasted fuel just, you know, decrement your potential margin. And so you in in order to run very efficient, you have to put a lot of rules and policies and procedures, which are the opposite of Karen.
 
 Let me give you an example. We shut the doors to leave on time because if you don't leave on time, it shows up in your metrics. The Wall Street Journal gets that. The world gets that. You're burning extra fuel.
 
 All of us you know, oh, not good. Thanks. But what we introduced in this world that I gave back to the employees and answers was this ability to go ahead and care. Best example, you have a woman with 2 kids traveling by herself, you know, going you know, traveling economy, getting from pivot from a small city to a large city has to make a connection, and we make her late. And we make her run across the airport to get to her next flight only to know minutes before the flight's supposed to schedule.
 
 We've already are shutting the door in our face. And if the last flight of the day and what does she do with 2 kids? She's gotta go find all the time. Right? And so we it's the best example I can come up with because the carrying aspect of this court floor was in essence around, no, you as a gate agent.
 
 Lowest rung of our operational tears, you have my permission, our permission to hold that door open. And if anybody asks you why you made that plane late, you said because this woman with 2 kids was making the last connection to the world. That is a powerful message for someone at that you know, look, the people that have lost trust in the system and, you know, nobody cares about us, you start executing on stuff. And, of course, the dials it, oh my god. You're gonna have a ton of late lanes, and you're gonna go an absolute opposite.
 
 All of a sudden, when you capture the hearts and minds, you get this discretionary effort. So we didn't we got to a point where all our flights were leaving on time, the ones that didn't have that situation. So slowing down for someone to take care of someone was really an employee important part. And then we added things that were personal in nature. Like, safe carry, dependable, efficient.
 
 It is not. I told people what you should point to others to be. Like, like, no. You should be this, and you're not being dependable. You're not, like, no.
 
 We should all use those terms, look ourselves in the mirror and say, am I being safe and carrying a dependable or efficient? It is our duty, manage ourselves. And if we all do that right? So you think of, we are building this brilliant strategy. I'm hiring the best people in the system.
 
 My successor, who's, again, succession plan, an important part of this, are all being built in the background to build this wonderful complex business strategy. But the underlying thing, the first thing that I had to fix was that in company culture, and we distilled that into the simple core 4, which, you know, when you read it or here, it's like, no. What does it mean? What it meant? The oldest individuals of what they went through.
 
 And so is it what presenting? That is what true effective strategy is because all of a sudden, you have what's now a hundred and 40000 people, all of us at understanding what we need to go through and, importantly, feeling part of it, it part of it, not just that you got my input, you understand me. Right? This concept of Carrie made a big difference to these people who did wanna shut the door, but they also didn't wanna place their supervisors like, why were you late? So allowing them to do that was an important thing.
 
 So, again, long winded aspect of this, but I think those are those are the important human qualities which you raised in your question. About, you know, sort of developing and executing on strategy.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Yeah. No. I just personally, personally, and I've written a book on it is, I believe, in entrepreneurship. And if you give people the right understanding and let them make the right choices that they we can trust them to do great things. There's so many questions that I'd love to ask, but I know that we're reaching the top of our time with you.
 
 I I think that strategists and innovators today we serve leaders. Right? And I think it's important for us to understand what leadership is and what leaders want. So you've just laid out kind of what the strategic direction was. Can you talk to us about what someone who's just looking at the numbers of the strategy might be missing, and how do we actually actuate that through leadership?
 
 Oscar Munoz: You know, I'll twist your question around to make a remark that I I think is important for business leaders because it I like strategy, the term leadership. Right? There's even more books about leadership and how you should deploy. And we all read those, and, you know, we read them over the weekend, and we come back and try to implement. In my I have come with a phrase that it's just simple for words, and it's just, you know, leadership is never about you, but it's about the people you lean.
 
 And think about that. Apply that when because you're smart. You're intelligent. You have a awareness of everything. You know the solutions that need to be implemented.
 
 So that's about you. You know the attributes you'll get from putting that in place. You know, when you go to your CEO and you she's gonna be excited about that. Yeah. That's all about you.
 
 The hard part is what is the best thing for the people you lean and putting that at the forefront is an important characteristics because it keeps you balanced, it keeps you humble, because the things sometimes, the decisions you have to make that can be for sell, promotion, self agronization, all that sort of stuff. I'm not necessarily the best things, and you see that in this world all the time. All this, you know, this roundabout of CEOs leaving, you know, there's 1500 CEOs left their roles or some number like that. And as I look at all of them, it's like, it was there here's what we're gonna do. Here's what I'm gonna do.
 
 Here's a and it's like, what does what does the team need? My story about safe carrying and the carrying aspect of that. Right? That actually would have an impact on our operating metrics. It could have it was a risk I had to take.
 
 But the abundance of trust that it created and followership met. Again, it was about them, not about me. And so I offer all of that to you again. It seems right, but here's a person that took a airline stock from 40 to almost a hundred before COVID, where no airlines has done that before, took a company like CSX from a 7000000000 market cap with that team, totaled about 70. But it's the it works that level of human engagement and understanding and learning from that before you lead is a critical thing.
 
 So leadership is my figuring that out and making it about them and not necessarily about you, which is not an easy thing to do in our world.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: I love it. I love it. So start with them and start with the people and the organization and the culture.
 
 Oscar Munoz: That's my approach. It's worked for me. So I'm sure you'll find I'm sure you'll find your own.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Amazing. Yeah. No. Amazing. Well, thank you, Oscar.
 
 Again, we have so many so much more we could discuss, and we so appreciate you taking the time to write this amazing book, turnaround time, uniting. An airline and its employees in the friendly skies. How in addition to buying the book, how else can people continue to stay connected with you and
 
 Oscar Munoz: I'm a you know, I I've learned to use social media more. I was reluctant to do that. Because I thought there was self promotional, and I always have that reluctance. But as somebody that advises me to ask, you know what? There's fifth graders out there talking about the stuff that you do.
 
 You're the only 1 that's actually done it had done it successfully. So you do you wanna let fifth graders into his term fifth graders to do it? Or do you wanna take I spent time on LinkedIn under my name, and I have an Instagram handle as well that we try to differentiate. So Always do that.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Great. We'll put that in other notes as well. No. And thank you for sharing that. Thank you.
 
 I mean, you're Now serving United employees, but everyone else. So thank you for that, and thank you for taking the time to be with us today.
 
 Oscar Munoz: Thank you, sir, again. And pleasure to meet you. Great to meet you.