Last night around 10pm the internet – more specifically twitter – exploded with activity around a planned 10:30 speech by President Obama on an unknown topic. We now know that topic was the announcement of the death of Osama bin Laden following a US special forces mission in Abbottabad, Pakistan. When the first news broke, I was in the middle of watching this Stanford Business School lecture by United Airlines CEO Jeff Smisek, which I was preparing for today’s Movie Monday.
Smisek, who is the newly minted CEO of the merged United and Continental, discusses a range of topics during the lecture. Through the lecture, he emphasises how vulnerable the industry is from external shocks, like that we saw on 9/11. Though while those shocks, whether from volcanoes, fuel or attempted underwear bombers, are just the nature of the industry, it is not the thing that defines your business.
What Smisek suggests without explicitly spelling it out is long-term sustainable organizational stability is found from within by transparently understanding the state of your business and creating a work environment where people develop trust.
There’s been a lot of discussion about the Boeing/IAM/National Labor Relations Board controversy about the Charleston 787 line, and Smisek unwittingly adds his own take on a higher contextual level. Smisek ultimately says that the stability between management and its workforce isn’t about union representation, but the overall relationship between those who participate in building the enterprise:
“And even in a unionised workforce, you can build that relationship with a unionised workforce where the work thinks of themselves as employees of the enterprise first and union members second. If you have it flipped where it’s union first and enterprise second, that’s a path to ruin.”
This week’s Movie Monday runs just shy of 23 minutes. Enjoy!
This post was originally published to the internet between 2007 and 2012. Links, images, and embedded media from that era may no longer function as intended.
This post originally appeared at Flightglobal.com from 2007 to 2012.