Quote:
Originally Posted by Andy
Link didn't work for me, but if you think the average CEO salary of a company the size of JBLU gets paid a bit more than $3M/yr, you're in for a rude awakening and won't want to look at my link. Keep in mind that's 2013-2014 salaries in my link.
https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/sites/g...ation-data.pdf
The salary gap is at all levels of airline management, and is the reason why all airlines are stuck with mediocre management. The talented managers can walk into compensation packages in other industries that are at least double what airlines pay. But I guess the 2.3 GPA MBA grads have to go somewhere.
Or is it the recruitment and hiring system is too formulaic and administered to a certain template?
Sure... I would look at advanced degrees more favorably but I wouldn’t limit to that. I wouldn’t want a professional student. Also I wouldn’t discriminate by age or experience necessarily. My primary criteria would be: what have you learned (technical and philosophical), and what have you done with it. This would firstly eliminate the people who are professional managers. For example, I wouldn’t want to get an executive or CEO type because they don’t actually do anything themselves. It’s usually a subordinate that has a great idea and does the actual implementation.
As much as I detest Facebook, it can be used as a case study of a personality. Zuckerberg created something himself with a college friend. He had a technical knowledge and the innate business sense to intuitively understand what people would want in a product. Clearly age is not a discriminator nor is experience.
Steve Jobs was not someone to be considered as an academic but again he certainly had certain intuitive characteristics that propelled Apple the way it did. He was everything that you learned not to be in management 101. He was abrasive towards everyone and didn’t really care about the bottom line. He was also a micromanager and got involved in everything. However I think the results are indisputable. He had a perfectionist attitude that didn’t limit him to his formal education of English literature. Although he was not the primary technical guy of Apple in the beginning (Wozniak was), he certainly was very technically adept. What he didn’t know he learned. But he was also an artist and demanded that every product they made be a work of art which is why when you open an iPhone box, it’s an experience. He treated people like garbage when they didn’t perform. I would imagine he would shoot 3/4 of JetBlue management if he was the CEO! Most importantly, he was a principled idealist. He didn’t necessarily do things for the money although he intuitively understood that they could make a boatload of money if his design principles were followed. He was right about everything.
Robin makes $500k base pay and $3M with benefits and options. Certainly he’s not as well-paid as other CEOs but I’ve always felt executive compensation is too high anyways for what you get out of it. I have no doubt that at that price point, there’s probably someone that just (barely) graduated college with a 2.5 gpa and is another Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk. More compensation can always be tied to results. When I was in high school, there was this guy in our senior class who was an absolutely horrible student. However, one of the last classes that we took was one where we designed a product using all of the science and technology education that we had. Naturally the 4.0s did nothing of significance. However, this D student, who loved cars, learned enough in this science based high school to design and create a universal CV joint which he had always wanted to do as a hobby. Right after he barely graduated high school, he was hired directly into an executive position at General Motors. The rest of us got ripped off in college. This is an example that is one in million, but it just goes to exemplify that certain personality types will persevere regardless of the limitations life places on them.
I have met many JetBlue pilots that have the right stuff to immediately be in management and to show immediate results. Of course they hate pilots because JB is locked in a petty wages battle so they can’t use this untapped resource.