The High Flyers Podcast with Vidit Agarwal
00:59:55 · Alan Joyce
[00:59:55] S1: Yeah, that's a great question. I think Jetstar, because it was a startup, was a lot faster in moving and doing things. You're being involved in a lot of startups in the tech industry. And when you're starting something from scratch, the ability to move... It's like Jetstar was a speedboat. I actually had probably a terrible analogy at the time, which was that great scene out of Ben Hur, where he's got four stallions that is racing around the arena. And we had four businesses in Qantas at the time. We had Qantas Domestic, Qantas International, Qantas Loyalty, and Jetstar. And Jetstar was being run by Bruce when I left it, and I felt that was the stallion. It was pulling ahead, and you had to pull it back. But the other tree at the time were donkeys. They were very hard to move. You just couldn't get them going. And that was frustration when you came in, because you said, we need to adapt, we need to change. Things were changing rapidly in the environment, but the businesses weren't moving as fast. And I felt over time, by getting the right people to run them, by getting the right strategy in place, by getting the right culture in place, they all became those stallions, and we had the four horses around around the arena. But at the start, I think it was that frustration and that I didn't have I had that expectation this would be the same as running Jetstar. It would be as dynamic as a startup, and that was just not realistic and that led to a lot of frustration.
01:01:34 · Vidit Agarwal, Alan Joyce
[01:01:34] S0: The other one is we chatted earlier about the demands of being a public company CEO, right? Like how intense [01:01:40] S1: can Yeah, that's you the other thing. [01:01:41] S0: Can you talk for just a minute about a week in the life of when you were CEO, maybe towards the end of your tenure, cause I think towards the end of your tenure you were under extreme pressure, and it's for people to judge whether that was right or wrong. What was that like, like week to week? Give us an insight, you talked about the mindfulness earlier, but give us an insight, you'd wake up in the morning, what did your day look like towards the end of your tenure at Qantas?
01:02:04 · Alan Joyce
[01:02:04] S1: It's a good, it's a, that's a good catch up, because that was the big difference also between running Jetstar and running Qantas. Was quite significant because you were, once you became Qantas CEO, it really just changed. The elevation was completely different. There was a lot more of a high profile. And then the other thing was a lot more stakeholder management. So rather than just running the strategy, running the people management, you had to deal with the government, you had to deal with the media, you had to deal with shareholders, and you had to deal with the board. So the whole stakeholder management side of the job was a completely different skill sets that were needed. And your communication skills became very important in all of that. And then you had a lot more employees spread out around the world as Podcast flew into every continent. So communicating to them was also an extreme challenge as well, particularly because a lot of your workforce is in the air or it's it's never one location. And and then it was the recognition because I think Australia is a bit unique for its CEOs. They appear in the media a lot more than you would in The UK than they would in The United States. So then there's the recognition of you walking down the street and somebody recognize you. And I tell a few stories of the good and bad with that bit of... So there's one time there at the end where this guy, he challenged me on George Street as I was going to get a haircut. He was protesting inside Medibank, and he asked for a selfie. That happened, so I was happy to take a selfie. But it turned out he was videoing, and then he started shouting abuse about us asking people to take vaccines at the time to travel and to work, which was controversial. And then he turned out to be a controversial individual himself. We went along, and then I reacted to it. I tried to stay calm for a while, but when he gets so much abuse, and my reaction to it, told him to piss off. And then I told him to f off, and it became viral. And the security guy said, that is exactly what you shouldn't have done, and it turned out, it talks about in the book, the guy had a bit of history where it was absolutely the wrong thing to have done, to react to it that way. But it was part of the public recognition and the public aspects of being in public life.
01:04:30 · Alan Joyce, Vidit Agarwal
As you know, I also got it with the pie in the face. Somebody protested against my support on marriage equality. He didn't like a strong gay man speaking out on marriage equality, and I had a physical attack, a homophobic attack in West Australia just before I was due to give a speech. So they were parts of the job that you didn't expect that you were going to have to run into, and probably an element of being that public figure. [01:04:58] S0: Yeah. And I've heard that with other folks that I've had either on the show or spoken to privately. I think that's one thing that most of us don't quite understand and I think it's something it's hard to understand till you're in the role, right? I want to fast forward till maybe there's the end of Qantas and I want to talk about even the book writing process and also the period in between after you left Qantas and you released the book. But end of Qantas, what I'm hearing here is you were hoping to leave Qantas at its peak, right? At its peak, at your peak, unfortunately, works out in funny ways. Left at a time when the company was under intense criticism, and you were under intense criticism. What is the hardest truth to accept from that time?:
01:05:41 · Alan Joyce
[01:05:41] S1: So I think think you're right. My plan was to leave in 2019 when I was thinking about 2019 going into the one hundredth anniversary of Qantas, and I would have left on the high. I did agree to stay because we were raising equity at the time. The borders had all closed. I was in the position where I felt an obligation to stick with it, even though I knew it was horrendous and it was tough at the time, and it became an issue in raising the equity. And the board asked me to stay for three years. I think, again, sliding door moment, I think probably good for me, maybe not good for the company, would have been to leave then at that stage and not go on to do the equity raising. I think what then happened when you look back on it, I think we got a lot of things right, but we got a lot of things wrong. And we made a number of different mistakes during that period of time. But it comes back, you know, to this decision making environment that we were in. We were worried about the airline going bankrupt. Virgin, Rex and bonds eventually went bankrupt. 40 airlines around the world went bankrupt. So we believed that we had to make really tough decisions to get it through. And it was that survival instinct, that focus on what we needed to do to get there. And within that, there were some decisions that were mistakes. They were clearly mistakes. We could have done differently, could have done better. I say in the book, hindsight is a great thing because all decisions are reviewed in hindsight, but they're made in real time. And you just have to, in the book, I try and take you to being in the room when the decisions were made and why they were made, and you can make your own opinion on them, and then how they panned out. And within that period of time, there were a lot of things that didn't work out well. But I look at Qantas when it came through COVID, and, you know, I'm always a glass half full type of person, and I look at Qantas compared to some other airlines, particularly the airline closest to us, Air New Zealand. Air New Zealand are really struggling because they didn't make the tough calls during COVID. Their share price is below where it was before COVID. Qantas is ahead. They're not making money, Qantas is.
01:07:54 · Alan Joyce, Vidit Agarwal
Qantas is doing projects like Project Sunrise and buying aircraft that we ordered in the middle of COVID because we made really tough calls and brave calls back then, like doing Project Sunrise. And it's got a great future ahead of it where other airlines didn't. And yet did we make mistakes with flight credits, with with the illegal sacking of the TWU members, with what we did on Ghostflights? Yes, we did. But in the book, explained what happened with them and why that happened. And I say, yeah, if I had hindsight all over again, of course you wouldn't make those calls, but you don't have it at the time. And it gets back to this decision making process. We talked to the staff in it, where sometimes you, your best call is the right call, your next best call is the wrong call, and it's better than doing nothing. And I think the case study of the airlines that did nothing show that's the case. [01:08:49] S0: If you actually had left Qantas in 2019, would you still have written the book? [01:08:55] S1: I always had a plan to do it. Yes. So I had, I had a few friends of mine saying, you've a lot of great stories, you know, because when you're at dinner parties, when you're talking to people, you talk about the stories of the history over time. And I always wanted to celebrate my parents and talk about their story as well. So I had this plan on the back of my mind that I would do that at some stage. I may have not done it as early as I did, or I would have done it eventually.