Turnaround Time: Uniting an Airline and Its Employees in the Friendly Skies
Oscar Munoz
HarperBusiness/An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers (May 2023)

“If that’s how you’ve always done it, it’s probably wrong.”  Charles Kettering

I have always been interested in books written by CEOs (even with assistance) who explain how they convinced the people they led — when engaged in a turnaround — “to believe in a shared story and, in doing so, to believe in their own individual abilities to make that story a reality.” That is what Oscar Munoz accomplishes when sharing a wealth of details about the turnaround he led at United Airlines.

Here’s some background information. In an article by Jeremy Bagaisky for Forbes magazine, he observes,”Hired in September 2015 to fix festering problems resulting from United’s poorly executed 2010 merger with Continental Airlines, Munoz was sidelined a month later by a heart attack and received a heart transplant.

“Following his return to work in March 2016, he concentrated on smoothing out the airline’s relationship with its workers, negotiating new contracts with labor unions, and improving on-time performance and business class service. Munoz, who came from the railroad industry, also brought in the deeply experienced Kirby in April of that year to oversee the nitty gritty of operations and network planning after Kirby was pushed out as president of American Airlines.”

“Wall Street analysts’ patience was wearing thin by the end of the year amid skepticism of a campaign spearheaded by Kirby to reclaim market share from other carriers by expanding service 4% to 6% a year through 2020, risking a fare war that could further hurt its thin profits.”

Two years later the expansion strategy was looking like a winner. “United had overhauled its hubs in Chicago, Denver and Houston, adding hundreds of connecting flights first to larger cities and then to smaller ones that it retreated from in the wake of the Continental merger. And it did so in a way that boosted margins.”

This is an intensely personal narrative that  Munoz develops within the framework of a memoir rather than a formal autobiography. The tone is conversational and at times confidential. These are among the subjects of greatest interest to me:

o  The nature and extent of impact of childhood influences and experiences that help to explain his success as a business leader
o Munoz’s “True North”
o When the United turnaround seemed certain to fail, how Munoz responded to the given circumstances
o How specifically Munoz developed a sense of teamwork among those stakeholders most deeply involved in that turnaround
o The lessons Munoz learned that will probably be of greatest value to other leaders when involved in comparable circumstances

I thoroughly enjoyed the pleasure of Oscar Munoz’s company and especially appreciate his wit and humility as well as his leadership and management skills. He demonstrates that a crisis does not develop character so much as it [begin italics] reveals [end italics] it.