Something that I tell our employees is we're now a 5-year-old startup embedded inside a 100-year-old airline.
One of the most important jobs of a leader is to always make people feel optimistic about the future. And I think that is one of the main jobs of leadership is optimism. It can't be naive optimism. It can't be Pollyannish. If people are afraid and worried and it's toxic, and if you can have people focused on an optimistic future, make them believe in the future, and I also believe in self-fulfilling prophecies, like we're going to do this incredible stuff, and you make it a whole lot more likely by saying you're going to do it.
You know, we did some work on leadership and one of the aspects of it is great leaders find a way to constantly radiate energy to others, right? And you know, my son who was taking chemistry, he's like, 'Oh, dad, like they're exothermic.' And I'm like, 'Okay, great.' But it feels like that's a piece to this, too, is in that moment, you're giving that person some energy.
Yeah. And people can feel if you have energy and passion. And another thing I say to especially young people, I get asked, but people often confuse management and leadership. Management is about compliance. It's about did you show up to work on time? Did you do the checklist? And it's really important. But leadership is about inspiration and vision. It's about how you make people feel.
Are you management or leadership?
You know, there's always some mix. But the further you move in the career, you more and more index to leadership. And by the time you're in my job, by the time you're the CEO, like it's 100% inspiration. If I'm the one doing compliance checklists, like we've really screwed up. And so it's 100% about inspiration and vision.
The reason I was excited to do this is our organizations have some common history. We're both in our hundredth celebrations and you know, as you know, not many organizations make it to 100 and I know you're now looking forward. What I'm trying to figure out is what are the things that may change and what are the stuff that are going to stay the same as you look forward and maybe we don't know for the next hundred years, but if you took the next decade for United, what are some things you're pretty confident won't change? And what are some things you think will change?
Well, first what I'd say at United is one of the things I tell our employees is we're now a 5-year-old startup embedded inside a 100-year-old airline. And really I think that is coming out of COVID. It gave us a chance to really reset the culture, technology, like across the board. And as I look forward, you know, I think we believe that we're going to drive much of the change. There's a lot of things that are going to stay the same unless somebody invents a transporter. Doesn't seem likely. We're going to...
No, I love it. It'd be super cool. It'd blow up our business, but it'd be super cool. But how do we make the whole experience something that feels good? And some of that is the onboard experience having seatback entertainment that's really, you know, have things that are relevant that give you something to do. I think what will feel more revolutionary to customers is how do we communicate with you transparently? Like an epiphany for me was a CEO a decade ago, you know, of a Fortune 50 company told me like, you know, one thing I don't like about travel is like it's the only time in my life that I'm not in control. I want to tell every customer the same thing, you're exactly what I would hear.
Just like one of the other things that I think the best thing I learned at the Air Force Academy is for life and for business is no excuses, sir. You're a cadet, like it sucks. Like you know something happens, it's not your fault, you know, and there's going to be consequences of it. Someone asks you, you have to say no excuses, sir, and you have to take the consequences whatever they are. But god is it a great lesson. It's so common in the business world for people to like make a list of excuses, oh the weather, oh this, oh that, oh this, like all these things that are not my fault. And our chief operating officer actually, he says it slightly different. He says it may not be our fault but it is our responsibility.
Our responsibility. I love that. Well, and it moves you back to that mindset of so what are you going to do about it? Right. What's the solution?
One of the ones we have still aren't quite fixed but it's getting fixed is Wi-Fi. Like still one of the things our flight attendants have to apologize for is Wi-Fi. Starlink is going to fix it. Like everyone in the plane, we're excited about that.
Yeah. Yeah. We're going to and we'll have...
I am because it helps the productivity of all my...
I know. I know. Yeah. They may not be excited. I know the boss is expecting to work now. The boss expect there was no Wi-Fi. Right. Now it's like no no Scott told me.
But we'll have half the fleet on Starlink by the end of this year. Essentially the whole fleet done next year.
To consistently apologize for. That's really the way I thought about like I don't want our employees focused on everything's great. We're going to take care of you. And if they're having to apologize, that doesn't work.
I love that idea of you know what we know and so it gives them as much empowering as you can have in a dynamic.
Yeah. And what you find too is you have to build technology to do that and it just has all kinds of other benefits. You're trying to build the technology to communicate but it winds up having all kinds of other like one of the cultural things, this is a different point, but one of the cultural things that's the most impactful I think in the last five or since I became CEO is every airline has what are called delay codes. So if a flight is delayed even if it's one minute, why was it delayed? There's a code. Was it the pilots? Was it the flight attendants? Was it the gate agents? Catering, like what you know. And they're just like every airline I've been at, there are just wars in break rooms about who, you know, four-hour fights amongst people about who gets pinned with the delay. And everywhere I've been, like the chief operating officers would say, well, nobody's ever actually accountable for that. This is not about individual accountability, this is we need the data so we can fix the airline and run the airline better. And I just didn't buy it. And first week that I was CEO, said we're getting rid of delay codes, like a cultural point. We did things like we put cameras up. We used, we didn't really call it AI back then, but we used learning models and we've avoided all that fighting and time that used to go on and it was like a huge cultural point. But the point of this is like when you invest in the right kind of technology, you don't know what all the benefits are going to be.
I loved your idea of a 5-year startup and a 100-year company. In that five-year time, you've added a lot of folks. Yeah. And you've also been innovative at least from the outside on the pathways that you can join United in, everything from flight attendant to pilot. How's that going? How are you thinking on the sourcing of talent, the bringing in of talent? Where are you on that journey?
We're not really representative, I think, of most companies or the world in general. You know, the biggest airline in the country. It's one of the few places left, I'm proud of this, that, you know, people with a high school diploma can come work as a flight attendant or a gate agent or on the ramp or in tech ops, you know, and with overtime working hard and, you know, with overtime and once they get to, you know, the top of the seniority scale can make six-digit incomes with great benefits. That's great. You know, buy a house, send their kids to college. There's just not many careers left like that. So, I'm proud of that. And so we opened up our flight attendant hiring and you know I don't remember the exact number we were going to hire, you know, two or three thousand and you know we have like 75,000 applications within a couple of hours.
