David Neeleman founded the airline Jet Blue.  It’s known as an innovative, low cost, customer service-based airline. When he started the company, Neeleman felt like they would need “nice” people to develop the culture he sought.  A “go to” question that was used in interviews was: “At work or in life, can you describe a […]

We want to be known for the “respect” we give. This year in our leadership training, we talked about respect.  We posed the question:  when someone meets our company, what will be our standard for showing respect? Several themes arose: We don’t ignore strangers, we engage them.  We acknowledge their presence.  We learn their mission. […]

“Every obstacle an opportunity to practice a virtue: patience, courage, humility, resourcefulness, reason, justice, creativity.”  Marcus Aurelius, emperor. Encountering obstacles successfully requires a certain mental heartiness.  The ancient emperor Marcus Aurelius described what that heart looked like with the quote. Is this you? What happens when you encounter trials? Do you blow up emotionally or […]

Elite teams work on getting better.  The teams do it on their own accord.  They find the motivation from within to stretch their ability and results. In our operations, we have hundreds of small teams.  We believe our company works better when each small team creates an agenda for improvement. There are five areas that […]