The High Flyers Podcast with Vidit Agarwal
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.
01:08:55 · Alan Joyce, Vidit Agarwal
[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. [01:09:25] S0: Yeah, because I think if I asked the critics about you, the critics rather, they would say the book is an act of rebuttal about some of the stories that people have said about you, right? How do you think of the book, and I said earlier, like my view on human beings, and this is me included, is we all at the end of day, want to be approval... Approved and loved and appreciated and feel heard and listened, and I would like to think you have aspects of that. Is that an element as well of the book where you're like, this is my side of the story and I disagree with some of the commentary out there?
01:09:59 · Alan Joyce
[01:09:59] S1: I think when you know, when you see the book, you know that there's there's a lot of chapters that don't even cover that, and it's only at the end, the last chapter really, that I really covered those issues that came up. That, you know, if I could have written the book or read that chapter, I would have, but I needed to address it. I needed to explain the way it happened because that was part of the story. But that was not the intent. The intent was there's a chapter on my parents, there's a chapter growing up in Ireland, there's a chapter on working in Aer Lingus, there's a chapter in setting an airline up like Jetstar, there's a chapter on the QF 32. So the vast majority of the book is just the storytelling. It's not rebuttal to anything. It's giving people interesting stories on what happened. And the last part is about not rebuttal, it's to say, here's what happened. Here's my my view from inside the room of what actually occurred, and you can make your own judgment on it and say, was that a mistake? Was that ill informed? Could you have done something differently? And people can make their own decisions on it, but it gives that perspective on it. That was not the intent. And it is a small part of the book that covers those issues, but the vast majority of the book covers what I thought were interesting stories about my career, my parents' life and things I thought people would find interesting.
01:11:22 · Vidit Agarwal
[01:11:22] S0: Last year I had the former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull on my podcast and I asked him, I said, is, what did, what's one thing that changed after you left office? He said the phone stopped ringing. People didn't reach out to him the same way and that people that were friends were no longer there to speak to. And I think a lot of CEOs say that as well when they leave public life or they leave that CEO job, the phone stops ringing and the concept of relationships changes and they realize who's truly for them. Can you reflect on that? Has that been true in your life where some people that you thought were there for you on speed dial stopped talking to you?