Entrepreneurial leadership

Entrepreneurial leadership with Joel Peterson, Chairman of JetBlue Airways

The four fundamental elements of innovative leadership

I'm excited that you're joining me. I've got a great interview for you. Most of the time I'm interviewing leaders, thought leaders from the HR and talent development space. Every now and then, I get to talk to a business leader and executive who's not necessarily from an HR background, but who cares deeply about developing people. I've had a couple of CEOs. In this episode, I'm sharing an interview with Joel Peterson, who is the Chairman of JetBlue Airways retiring in May 2020. He's the former Chairman of the Hoover Institution and the Founding Partner of Peterson Partners, a Salt Lake City-based investment management firm with a billion dollars under management. Since 1992, Peterson has been on the faculty at the graduate school of business at Stanford University, teaching courses in real estate investment, entrepreneurship, and leadership.

He's been called the Mr. Rogers of Silicon Valley and has appeared on Fox, CNN and all different publications, media and this show. He has a book out called Entrepreneurial Leadership: The Art of Launching New Ventures, Inspiring Others and Running Stuff. In this interview, we talk about a whole bunch of different topics mostly from his book. We talk about what great leadership looks like, the importance of trust, the importance of having a mission, strategy alignment and why that's important, how to build a great team, how to engage a team, how to develop a team and how to deliver results among other things. If you're in talent development, if you are in a leadership position at all, you're going to enjoy this interview.

I want to let you know that I'm building some new things and I'm going on some entrepreneurial ventures of my own. You can find out more about that as well as get any of our free resources anytime by going over to our website, TalentDevelopmentHotSeat.com. I also created a free resource to help those in talent development who are pivoting during difficult times, as many of us have been. You can get that at a different site, OwnYourCareerOwnYourLife.com/talentdevelopment to get a short free five video, miniseries, video series I created on pivoting together in talent development. We all have a lot of things going on. I've been hosting virtual roundtables, talking to a lot of leaders, talent development and finding out what's going on. I wanted to share some of that back with people. We created that resource still as relevant as ever. I'd love for you to check that out.

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I am joined by Joel Peterson, who is the Chairman of JetBlue Airways and author of the book, Entrepreneurial Leadership. Joel, welcome to the show.

It’s good to be with you, Andy.

I was looking through notes about your book and all the things that you've done in your career. All the leadership positions and teaching at Stanford for many years. It’s impressive. For people that don't know you, maybe we can start with a quick intro who you are, what you do, and a little bit of your background would be great.

I grew up in the Midwest, born in Iowa, raised in Michigan. I went to public schools and after graduating from business school, going to work for a developer by the name of Trammell Crow. I was assigned and spent a couple of years in France, became the treasurer of the company, then the chief financial officer, ultimately the managing part after which I formed my own private equity venture and real estate firms, and then began teaching at Stanford. Along the way became Chairman of JetBlue and served on about 36 different boards. I always tell people I can't keep a job. I was the original guy in the gig economy.

You throw in there along the way the, “I became Chairman of JetBlue Airways.” How did that come about?

I was one of the original investors. They realized that they had a bet, the company deal that they had to do in building a terminal at JFK. This would be almost a billion-dollar project. They looked around the board and nobody had ever built a building. One of the board members said, “The guy who used to teach the real estate course at Stanford that I took was the CEO at a big real estate development company. I wonder if he could serve on the board.” I ended up serving on the board, building the building, getting it in on time and under budget. One thing led to another and soon I was chairman.

[bctt tweet="The entrepreneurial leader can set policy, manage complexity, preside over an existing institution, and understand politics and power." via="no"]

I didn't know any construction projects ever came in on time or under budget and that's good. In New York and under the airport, maybe they need to hire you to oversee what's going on at LaGuardia.

In point of truth, we had a wonderful guy who's building the LaGuardia Airport. Richard Smyth is his name. He’s a fantastic guy, competent and I'd trust him to do anything in it. He deserves all the credit.

JetBlue became a strong brand in the United States for many years. You served as chairman for many years. What does that mean? What does that usually entail for you on an annual quarterly basis?

You're in charge of running board meetings, the lead of the independent directors, work with the CEO and the management team. Typically, you'll have four two-day board and committee meetings a year and one two-day offsite a year. I used to talk with the CEO at one point every single Saturday, and then later on every other Saturday, and then finally once a month to check-in for an hour and go over everything. It is derivative of having a great CEO. If you think about it, that is the number one job of a board is to ensure that you've got a great CEO in place. We were fortunate JetBlue had three terrific CEOs.

I’m curious about all this experience working in the airline industry or overseeing it over the last few years. We're still in the middle of this COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown, which has hit the travel and airline industry hard. What has that been like in the airline industry to try to keep things going while people aren't traveling, I know there are lots of planning that goes into routes, and figuring out when people are going to be flying?

You can't figure it out. There are too many variables. What we do is we run a bunch of different scenarios. You've heard of the different recovery plans. There's a V-shaped recovery, W-shaped recovery, U-shaped recovery and L-shaped recovery. We run scenarios for all of them, but your job is to survive. That means that you've got to have cash and extending that liquidity runway by deferring capital expenditures, reducing operating costs, differing things, getting out of hobbies, doing everything that you can because you've got to survive in the short-term for there to be a long-term. That's job one.

Getting Out Of Hobbies

You go into survival mode, figuring out who's essential and who's not. You said, “Getting out of hobbies.” Can you elaborate a little bit more on what that means?

Any business that is around for long picks up lint, you try things, you do and soon you have a committee that's set up to do this, that or the other. I've learned over many years of serving in many senior positions to sunset every committee. Otherwise, they get a life of their own, soon there's overhead, people get invested in them and you sunset everything. It's the idea of zero-based budgeting and is a powerful idea. I wish we could get the government and everyone would do it because it forces you to go to zero, re-imagine your business every year or two years and figure out what's essential. You become much more efficient. In an event like this, it forces everybody to do this. There's nobody who can go back in and be a presider as if nothing had changed.

There are lots of people out there suffering and we don't wish this on anybody, but it's interesting when things don't come along like this, it's almost needed sometimes to do a little bit of a reset in many industries, there's so much extra fluff going on the lint in the industry. I work in talent development. There have been people for many years saying, “We need to do more stuff virtually,” and they keep putting it off and then COVID-19 hit. Nobody is flying or getting together for in-person training and all of a sudden, we've been able to convert everything to virtual. We're running all these programs over Zoom and a lot of them are going well and saying, “Where's this been?”

Entrepreneurial Leadership: The Art of Launching New Ventures, Inspiring Others, and Running Stuff

I ended up teaching a course at Stanford Business School to second-year students over Zoom. It was far better than I thought it would be. I couldn't have imagined that it would be this good. On the other end, it was far worse than being there in the classroom with them. There's a pent-up demand in terms of travel classroom, training, the things that you do that we’ll see it come back. It may not come back to where it was and maybe not immediately, but people do like to be with each other. That goes on at the water cooler. It doesn't happen over the TV screen.

I'm a big extrovert networker. I think people want to be together. I was having this conversation with my mentor and coach because I host a conference in the talent development space. We had it in January 2020. I'm starting to think about, “Can we host this conference again in January 2021? Will people be ready to fly and get together?” There are plenty of things we can do to network and get to know each other. You and I are face-to-face on Zoom, but there's no replacement to getting people together in-person, shaking hands, hugging, talking, having a beer or a cocktail or tea, chatting and getting to know each other. I do hope we'll be able to do that again for people.

Don't you find that a lot of the real business goes on outside the meeting? I find that it's walking someplace else or having a meal together and the real connections happen there.

The Entrepreneurial Leader

Tell me about the book. Why did you decide to write this book?

I've been teaching entrepreneurship for many years at Stanford and been an entrepreneur for many years. I'm getting old and I figured out that I ought to modify some of the stuff. I start the book with a near-fatal accident that my wife had where she was not careful on a mountain. She didn't do any of the things she knew she should do. She ended up being stranded on the mountain. I thought that that's a great metaphor for what we teach students in school. We teach them all these things, they go out and they run into trouble. I thought, “I'm going to get this down in the form of a checklist.” I thought of airline pilots because they have checklists. A pilot may be flying for 25 or 30 years, he'll get in the cockpit and they'll go over the checklist. He could probably do it from memory, but he goes over that checklist. What I tried to do is create a series of checklists for mindsets and things to think about so that you don't get stranded alone on the mountain. That's the idea.

I know there's a lot of wisdom that you have to share in there and we do need more of these checklists. I need them as well, even for things I've been doing for a while like in recording a podcast and I still make mistakes all the time. I've recorded over 300 or 400 of these. Why entrepreneurial leadership? Why is that the topic? I know you've been involved in both. Why does the world need entrepreneurial leadership or more entrepreneurial leadership?

It needs it now more than ever. We're not going to need presiders or administrators or peer managers. These are all important ways that people lead organizations, but we're going to need the entrepreneurial leader. Entrepreneurial leaders don't just light fires. The pure entrepreneur innovates, lights fires, but many times the fires go out, they don't spread and become wildfires. The idea of the Entrepreneurial Leader is they know how to make these fires spread, administrate which means that they can set policy, manage complexity, preside over an existing institution and they understand politics and power. All of these are important elements of it and only the entrepreneurial leader has all the five tools so they can build an enduring enterprise. The idea is to differentiate between the entrepreneur and the entrepreneurial leader.

The entrepreneur leader can still thrive in a corporate environment, a large company, but with a little bit more of that entrepreneurial mindset and with the tools that you layout in the book.

Some people who have reviewed said that they were surprised to see me refer to Alan Mulally who ran Boeing and Ford, as well as Stanley McChrystal, who was a four-star general that ran Joint Special Operations Command, the SEALs, Rangers, Force Reconnaissance, Marines, etc. They were surprised that I had listed them as entrepreneurial leaders because they ran big almost bureaucratic organizations, but they had the spirit of innovation. They could manage complexity, understood politics, were able to do all of these things that create durability and that's the essence of the Entrepreneurial Leader.

[bctt tweet="Trust is the most valuable currency that an organization has." via="no"]

Let's get into that essence and those points. What does a great entrepreneurial leader look like? What are those points that you layout?

There are four foundational elements that the entrepreneurial leader does. The first thing is they establish trust and to have trust, you have to do two things. One is you have to become trustworthy yourself, which means you deliver on promises and you're predictable, so people are going to make decisions when you are awake. The second thing is you ensure that the organization has a high trust culture. There are ways to be intentional about building and engineering trust within an organization. Trust is the most valuable currency that an organization has. That's the first thing that you have to do. The second thing is to have clarity around the mission, “What is it you're trying to do? What does winning look like?”

Figuring that out and articulating that in a way that everyone understands and has a line of sight from their job to that mission, means you don't have to motivate them. They're self-motivated. They want that mission. The third thing is the one that you spend your life and that is assembling a great team. “How do you source great people? How do you interview them? How do you do due diligence on them? How do you onboard them? How do you coach them? How do you demote them, promote them and fire them if you need to?” Putting the team together is the third foundational element. The fourth one is the execution tool kit. I list ten things that every entrepreneurial leader runs into with checklists against which they can check their mindset, their decision making. Those are the four foundational elements.

I want to go back to trust. It's one of those things that's obvious anyone would nod their head and said, “We need trust.” Yet there are many leaders out there who are not trusted by their people. How do we build trust in leadership? What are the most important things leaders should be thinking about or organizations should be thinking about for their leaders through real trust?

It starts with the integrity of the leader, which means there's no gap between what you say, what you do, your personal life and your professional life aren't at conflict and aren't at odds with each other. It starts there and then it moves to communicating lavishly, clearly, openly, transparently in bad times as well as good, to create a mission together that everybody owns, to encouraging respectful conflict, and dealing with that, to fixing betrayal. There are these ways to think about what violates trust and making sure that you don't do that. It's a sensitive thing. I've always said that it's fragile, but it's powerful. You can ruin it in a minute, but when it's there, everything goes faster, quicker, cheaper and is more flexible.

Whether you're trying to get clients as an entrepreneur or motivate a team, trust is important and critical. If you don't have that trust or you ruin that trust, it's going to hold you back. People are not going to want to follow you. One of the factors you mentioned in there was integrity and leadership. What does that mean to you? I know you break that down in the book as well.

A lot of people think of integrity as a virtue and whether there is that element of it, I don't think of it that way. I think of it more like structural integrity that there's sinking up of what you say and what you do. There's no gap between them because in effect, integrity means people can rely on you that you'll deliver on promises and that's why you trust them. If somebody doesn't have integrity, people are smart, they'll figure it out quickly. To me, it's not this fuzzy, feel-good word that people like to include in their mission statements, it's measurable and it's something that every leader has to have on their list to make sure that they're behaving with integrity.

It's measurable because it's observable. You can see people that don't follow through on the things that they say they're going to do. Eventually, that erodes the trust you have for them, the reputation that you don't want to work with them anymore. You mentioned mission statements a couple of times. The most organization feels they throw it up on the wall and nobody pays much attention to it. Can you talk about the importance of having a great mission statement as a leader, as an organization, and why that's important and important to get people to buy into it?

I make a differentiation between a mission and a mission statement. The reason I do that is the one that you mentioned, that everybody has a generic mission statement that they frame, hang on the board wall and then it creates criticism in the organization. Mission statements that are generated by third-parties or from a quarter office don't work. Having a mission though where you decide, “What do we care about?” The way that I like to do that is to have the whole team to say, “What are the five words we would like our brand to represent?” Debate them, refine them, wordsmith it, figure it out until you finally come to the five words in a statement around those who say, “We're excited about this. We can differentiate ourselves in the market. This is the peak we're going to climb.”

Entrepreneurial Leadership: To establish trust, you have to be trustworthy yourself and ensure that the organization has a high trust culture.

If it's not clear which peak you're going to climb, what you find is management teams climbing six different peaks. They're not belayed, don't help each other to the summit and it's a mess. Having a lot of clarity around, “This is what winning is. This is our mission.” The job of the leader is to help remove obstacles, encourage people, get resources to them and help people achieve what they want to achieve themselves, but might not be able to do without the leadership.

One of the things I was going to ask you about that lines up with that is the importance of alignment when you are executing on a strategy. You mentioned execution earlier. I worked for a strategy execution firm for many years and still work with clients on that. One of the biggest challenges I find are problems with organizations or the reason why great strategies fail is always an execution and that's usually because people are not aligned. They're not all clear on the same strategy. They're working on different things and it causes problems because people are going in different directions. Can you talk a little bit about the importance of alignment and how maybe you use that or see other great organizations getting people on?

To me, it's the number one thing that you have to do. It's the keymap. I find if I go into an organization and I find alignment between values, objectives, strategy, tactics, and the things they measure. If they're all in alignment, your organization almost manages itself. If they're out of alignment, it's difficult to get there. I ran a company once where we were telling people to stop building buildings. The markets were overbuilt, and yet we were paying them based on building buildings. There was no alignment between what we were saying our strategy was and what we were paying people to do. It caused discontinuity, stress, conflict, and ultimately blew the place apart.

There are lots of things that need to be done, but you go into an organization and you see that there is some misalignment. How do you get people aligned with one strategy?

I always start with, “What's our objective? What is winning? Let's define what winning looks like. What would it look like if we won?” You define it and you say, “It would happen in this period of time. It would have the following majors. What's our strategy for getting there?” You moved then to the strategy, we're going to go after the retail market or however you're going to do it. You say, “Who's going to do what by when, with what budget, what are the timeframes or the deliverables?” You’ll then figure out, “What is your dashboard? What are you going to measure?” When you go through it in a methodical way like that people say, “I don't agree that's what we should measure.”

People will easily compromise on the measures, but they won't compromise around values. If you have a conflict over values, people don't compromise and you're better off splitting up then. I want to find those values because values are priorities. People who don't have the same priorities will not be able to work together, will not compromise on them and you'll have a mess. I always say, “Let's get together, starting with objectives, work our way all the way down through what we measure, and then look back up to our values. If we're not, in agreement on that, then let's make some personnel changes.”

You make a differentiation there because there may be a disagreement on the strategy and we can come together on that, compromise and figure out where's the right way to go or the decision-maker makes the decision and everybody commits, whatever it may be. If you have a disagreement on values, then you're probably not going to change those. You're better off breaking apart either a partnership breaking up or someone leaving an organization saying, “This company is great, but it doesn't line up with my values,” or this employee is smart, but their values don't line up with our values and maybe we need to let them go.

That’s one of the hardest decisions, but I've learned over many years of doing this, that you never do it soon enough. As soon as you figure that out that it's time to split.

I had an experience in 2019 where I formed a partnership briefly with a good friend and we were planning on running an event together. We quickly found out over a few weeks and several phone calls that our values on how we wanted to do things did not align at all. Though we spoke about the things we wanted to achieve were similar, on how we wanted to approach it was far off and finally, we decided, “This is not going to work. It's going to end our friendship when we try to push this through.” We ended it and still good friends, both doing great things. We realized that our values didn't align for that particular purpose.

[bctt tweet="The leader's job is to help remove obstacles, encourage people, get resources to them, and help them achieve what they want to achieve." via="no"]

Congratulations because that didn’t happen. I know a lot of people who force it through and think about how they can come together. A lot of times our priorities, we learned at our mother's knees and they seem like apple pie and religion and we're not going to change them. There's no point in having that grief in your life.

Personal Brand And Personal Life

You write in your book about the importance of a personal brand and a personal life. I am big on the topic of a personal brand. I give talks on it and wrote about it in my book. It's popular in the entrepreneurial space, not as much in the corporate space. Let's start with a personal brand. Why do you think that those leaders need to be thinking about building their personal brand?

It gets back to the issue of trust. Your brand is your promise. It's what the market can count on you to do. You want that to be clear, understood, and never violate it. The other thing is the people who are working under you or taking direction from you, if they understand your brand, they're completely confident in making decisions for you. You're not going to be second-guessing them because they understand your brand. They're going to behave consistently ran. You end up making a bunch of 51/49 decisions and not a bunch of 70/30 decisions. It extends your reach, empowers them, makes for a happier organization. This idea of having a clear, solid promise to the marketplace and the personal brand extends you in powerful ways.

I like to think of it as your reputation as well. I gave a talk virtually to a group and we started talking about personal brand and say, “This is your reputation. You have one, whether you are intentional about creating it or not. You might as well spend some time creating an authentic brand and reputation that you want people to have of you. It means being generous or helpful or maybe you are hardworking to whatever you want that brand to be, but being more intentional about it instead of leaving it up the chance.”

I was an executive class at Stanford for one year. I was talking about culture and the power of culture. I had an experience with an executive guy who was crabby. He looked at me and says, “We don't need no stinking culture.” I said, “That's exactly the culture you've got then.” You'll have a culture and it will be a stinking one, the same with a brand.

You wrote about the importance of having a personal life as well, which I know is difficult for a lot of corporate executives.

It's your safe place, it's where you go to recreate, to refuel. People who don't have that end up making dangerous decisions, they're stressed out. They are making decisions based on the moment. Whereas people who are tend to be grounded in a personal life with people who love them, no matter what, make more predictable, more thoughtful, more all things considered decisions. I encourage everybody I work with to make sure they don't violate these personal spaces. I use the example of juggling with my students and say, “You'll be juggling professional balls and family balls. The family ones are glass and the professional ones are rubber.” The rubber ones they'll bounce. The glass ones will shatter and you may not be ever able to put them back together again and it will impact your life forever. Make sure that you don't drop the glass balls. You won't if you set some boundaries and say, “I'm going to preserve this area.” You won't drop the glass balls and everything will work better forever and for everyone.

Can you give an example of how you've done that or stuck with a boundary or where you've protected some of your personal life over the years?

I've told this story a number of times, but Trammell Crow, who was the first fellow I worked with, who was a well-known real estate developer, one of the pioneers in the spec development space. Trammell had his name on the door and he called me when I was first out of business school, it was a Sunday afternoon and he said, “Could you come down to the office? I want to work on a project with you.” I was brand new and I thought, “This guy's name is on the door. He's calling me, a graduated in MBA.” I need to go and I remembered I've been working long hours. I've reserved Sunday afternoons for my wife. I don't think we had any kids then. I said, “Trammell I'm sorry, I'll come down as early as you want and stay as late as you want on Monday, but I've reserved Sundays for my family.” That was the last time he ever asked me and I went on to become the CFO and then the managing partner of the company. It didn't kill my career. In fact, he appreciated that I had clarity around the boundaries in my life.

Entrepreneurial Leadership: Your brand is your promise. You want it to be clear, understood, and inviolable.

Putting Up A Great Team

Probably more respect for you that you stood up for those boundaries instead of letting them walk all over you. I hope other people take inspiration from that and set those boundaries. I try to do the same thing, having dinner with my family every night and taking off the weekends. Speaking of teams, you talk a lot about creating, forming, developing a great team. I wonder if you can talk about some elements of how to put a great team in place and then how to keep a team engaged and productive so that they are operating effectively. A lot of us are out there either working in teams or trying to put teams together and it's always a challenging situation.

I'm glad you started with putting one together. The most critical thing is sourcing great people. The issue is where do you find great people? There are lots of ways to do it. We have more access to people now than we probably ever have from different places. I think people who think about diversity have a better shot than those who are wedded to the idea of hiring themselves. It's always comfortable. It's the easiest way to get a team, feeling like they're together early on. If they all went to have the same Alma mater, same sports interests, same gender and same everything. It's harder and takes longer to put together the team that has diversity in it. You get different optics and different ways to see the truth, and it allows you to triangulate. You get a better sense of things. That takes longer, you have to be more careful, have more ways to source, have to be thoughtful in how you onboard them, have to do more due diligence, have to do more coaching. There is lots more work. In the end you get a much stronger, more capable team. It is the most important thing. Business is a team sport.

The team is critical in finding the right people. I'm glad you mentioned diversity and not hiring people that are the same as you because you're right, most people for a long-time went out there and said, “Let me find someone that looks like me or has the same degree, same school.” It's easy and comfortable, but it doesn't bring any diversity. For a long time, organizations all talked about hiring someone for a culture fit. I'm seeing a lot of pushback on that and the progressive companies talking about saying, “No. It's culture addition. Who can you hire that would be a better addition to your team, better addition to your culture, to your organization?” It sounds like you're saying that teams and leaders need to be looking for those additions, especially if they come from a diverse background or they bring a different set of experiences rather than someone who fits the mold.

Let me use the example I've used in a number of situations, which I think probably best describes the way to think about this problem. If you think about an orchestra, you would hate to have an orchestra where everybody played the oboe, it would be painful to listen to. Everybody's the same, it's a bunch of higher mees. Everybody's the noblest. On the other hand, you would hate to have an orchestra where everybody was playing from a different piece of music. It would be a cacophony of sound that would be also unlistenable. You want to have the different tempers, you want people playing different instruments, these different optics, but they have to share values. If everybody has a different set of values and say, “We're different that we can't get on the same page,” you've not got a team then, you have a mob. You have a mess. That's the way to think about that whole issue.

Diversity, equity, inclusion are hot topics. We've found over the years too that you can't have diversity. We've got to be able to let people speak up, be themselves in organizations as well so you can hear their ideas if you want to innovate and you want to get further. Is there anything you would add on the topic of inclusion and making sure that once you get those people in the door, that they are able to be heard?

One of the critical things that a high trust organization is that it's a listening organization and it doesn't punish disagreement. In fact, disagreement is what makes things interesting. It's how you find the best idea and they're committed to the best ideal wins. The best idea winning doesn't mean the most powerful person winning. As a leader, you have to be committed to the best idea winning and to encouraging discussion and disagreement. One of the ways that I used to do that was when somebody would bring me up conclusion, I'd say, “What else did you consider when you came up with this conclusion?” The first time you asked that, they don't have anything to say. “This is the right answer. What do you mean? What else did I consider? Once you've asked it once, the next time they come and say, “Here are the three things I thought of. This had this step around it.” You develop the sense of, “We debate. We look at different things.” That's a healthy way. That's a high trust organization’s way of dealing with issues.

You want to create a healthy debate and listen to different perspectives. We talked about putting a team in place. A lot of my readers are in talent development and thinking about, “How can we best develop our people, give them the tools and skills to be successful in their roles, successful as leaders in their organizations?” What has been your approach to developing talent? Do you think organizations invest enough in that?

Talent sometimes boils down to HR purchases of courses. I've been on the board at Franklin Covey for many years. I understand something about that business. There's addition there, but I think that the best talent development often comes within the organization debating, talking about things. I’ve taught by the Socratic method for many years. There's something about having a case, presenting it to people, having them debate it, learning from each other. There's something healthy that goes on when that happens. I'm a big believer in that as part of the equation.

What's your approach or thought process towards raising engagement? You've got your great team. How do you keep them engaged? What things should leaders be thinking about for that?

[bctt tweet="Leaders who don’t have a personal life end up making dangerous decisions." via="no"]

To me, it goes back first to this idea of, “Do we share a common mission?” People love to win. If you can say, “We all win when this happens.” For some people, it's a financial win, for others it's a reputational win. for others it's the spirit of winning, but people love to win. Getting everybody on that page is important. If you ask the executives, you get 50 different answers as to what winning is. Getting everyone on the same page is the number one thing that brings people together.

When you've got a common mission, common purpose, everybody can get excited about it and they know why they're being asked to do certain things. There then is a lot more motivation versus being told to do things when they have no idea why.

This idea of the line of sight from your job to the objective is important. There's this old story about the guy that Kennedy interviewed in Cape Canaveral. He asked him what he was doing, he’s a janitor. The guy didn't say, “I'm a janitor, I'm sweeping the floors.” It was, “I'm putting a man on the moon.” They all own that mission.

In the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, a lot of leaders and organizations have been tested and we're facing a lot of change and uncertainty. How should leaders think about and approach major changes like this? It's not just business as usual when a crisis happens. Major changes happen, people are working remotely for the first time. How do we approach that as leaders to be effective?

They have to think about what is it they're delivering to the market. In other words, what I always think about it is, “What is your covenant with your customers? Is that still the covenant they want? What do they want?” You may have to reimagine what it is that you deliver, but you're going to have to be an entrepreneurial leader. You have to think entrepreneurially and you may have to reimagine your mission. Practically, you have to be decisive, make decisions quickly, change them if you've made the wrong decision, be optimistic because people don't want somebody who's down. Imagine new ways of winning and the first thing I said was you have to preserve cash. You have to survive.

Your whole team needs to know, “We're inside the tent together. We are planning this thing together. We all own it. We're going to do the tough things.” I know at JetBlue the board immediately cut its fees to zero and said, “We're not going to take this.” The management team came in and said, “We're cutting our salaries in half.” Everybody rolls up their sleeves up and says, “This is my contribution.” If everybody locks arms, you find that trust levels can go up. People can be energized by a hard time. I no longer fear adversity. I think adversity can make us stronger, better managers, clearer thinkers, more entrepreneurial, they’re nothing we would ever choose. You many times wish that on your worst enemy, but they can be good for us. You have to imagine, “How is this good for me? What can I learn from this?” The final thing that I'd say is it's an opportunity to be kind. People will remember forever how they felt going through this. A lot of people are stressed out. They're worried legitimately, an extra modicum of kindness, asking people how they are, taking an extra minute with folks, letting people inside your own thinking, that's the kind thing to do and it doesn't cost much to do that either.

Empathy is important during these challenging times. Joel, what would you say has been your proudest moment or biggest success in your career?

You won't believe this one, but I tend to love my students at Stanford. When I won the teaching award, it's given by the students, I was proud of that. I've had a bunch of business successes that people would say, “These are the things that you're going to be remembered for.” I would say that it's probably my relationship with my students.

What has been one of your biggest mistakes or failures in your career? What did you learn from it?

Entrepreneurial Leadership: The most critical thing in building a great team is sourcing great people.

The worst ones that I've made have been when I've known something wasn't quite right and I've stuck with it. Often, it's when there's somebody that I know that I need to move on and I keep hoping that they'll get better. I've known it and taught it. When it comes right down to it, I dither. It gets worse and it's harder to do and is a bigger mistake over time. I've made that mistake a couple of times.

That's a tough one because you don't want to let people down, but you got to make the right decision for them and for you. The book is called Entrepreneurial Leadership: The Art of Launching New Ventures, Inspiring Others and Running Stuff. The last question for you, for everyone out there thinking about their own careers, trying to find a way to accelerate their careers, what's one more piece of advice you would give?

This is from the book, it's a powerful idea, and that is there are five fundamental ways that people are motivated. They can be forced to do something. They can be motivated by fear out of fear. There's a lot of that going around. They can be motivated by a reward. A lot of people get a bonus, rewarded, and recognized. There's a sense of duty, which is a higher level of a motivator. Ultimately, it's love. Love is the most powerful motivator in the world. We need more of it in our world, in our business world, in our families, dealing with young people. I would say to think about moving up the motivation, getting things from fear. Fear and reward are where most of us live most of the time. If you can transfer that up to living based on duty and love, you're going to have a better life and you're going to make everyone else's life better.

What a great piece of advice to go out on. Thank you for spending time with me and sharing all of your wisdom from the book. I can't wait to read more and share this with my audience.

It’s my pleasure, Andy. It’s good to talk with you. Have a great day.

• JetBlue Airways
• Hoover Institution
• Peterson Partners
• Entrepreneurial Leadership: The Art of Launching New Ventures, Inspiring Others and Running Stuff
• OwnYourCareerOwnYourLife.com/talentdevelopment