Alan Joyce says he planned to leave Qantas in 2019 but stayed because the board asked for three more years.
He lists Qantas's mistakes as flight credits, the illegal sacking of TWU members and ghost flights.
Joyce came out to his parents in his late teens and turned down a Ryanair job to move to Australia and live openly.
Alan Joyce explains why he stayed at Qantas too long
Alan Joyce ran Qantas and Jetstar and left as a polarising figure who accepts the label. This is his account, after the fact, of how a working-class Dublin childhood and science degrees shaped a decision style built for crisis. The spine is his admission that he stayed longer than he planned, that the final years went wrong, and that a leader is judged by what the company does after he leaves.
Takeaways
Joyce says he stayed three years too long. He planned to leave Qantas in 2019 but stayed for an equity raise and three more years at the board's request. Leaving then, he says, would probably have been good for him and maybe not for the company.
He owns the flight credits and sackings. Qantas's handling of flight credits and the illegal sacking of TWU members are mistakes he names. He says the airline feared bankruptcy while Virgin and Rex failed, and he contrasts Qantas with Air New Zealand.
Short CEO tenures drive short-term thinking. Public company chief executives now last four to five years, which he says encourages short-termism. Qantas had a long-term board and chairman, and he suggests tying pay to how the company performs after the chief executive leaves.
Mindfulness was his best non-work investment. Meditation and mindfulness, learned at Aer Lingus in the early 1990s, he calls the best non-work investment of his life and the source of his ability to compartmentalise. At one point 10,000 Qantas passengers were airborne when he went to bed.
A Dublin childhood built his sense of injustice. He grew up in working-class Tallaght and was the first in his family to finish secondary school and earn a master's degree. A remedial-class assessment found he was bored, and his mother's three-hour protest over a bad fish taught him to fight injustice.
He left Ireland to live openly. Homosexuality was illegal in Ireland until 1994 and a neighbour was thrown out of home at 16. He turned down a job with Michael O'Leary at Ryanair and came to Australia to work for Ansett and live openly.
Jetstar was the best job he ever had. He built Jetstar from scratch with a team of about 20 and calls it the best job of his career. Changing a hundred-year-old company like Qantas is harder, and expecting the same dynamism there brought frustration.
What comes next
He will not take another chief executive or chair role.
He is setting up his own business and looking at opportunities through equity or sweat equity.
Speaking engagements and personal travel are on the list.
He says it is not healthy to define yourself by your job, and quotes Rod Eddington that we work to live.
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