The High Flyers Podcast with Vidit Agarwal
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?
01:11:57 · Alan Joyce
[01:11:57] S1: I've been very lucky with that, Vidit, because I've had a lot of people I'm still in contact with, that were colleagues that worked in Qantas, people I dealt with daily that I'm still in contact daily with now. I've had other CEOs that I've still have really good relationships with that I've run into that have been good. And I have a lot of very close friends that were outside of the business world who have been my foundation. And I have a lot of friends that we travel on holidays and they've been fantastic on it. What I don't miss is those, some of those calls. Because when you're an airline CEO, you used to get calls from other CEOs saying, we've lost, I've lost your luggage, or something, something's gone wrong on boarding, and can you fix it? And you got the calls in the middle of the night that you never used to want to miss about some problem that's occurred. Those calls. I remember I tell a funny story. Nearly in the last year, we had, as we were, the A380s were coming back out of being stored in the desert, we had one of the aircraft that had to divert into Azerbaijan, and it landed in Azerbaijan, and it was over Christmas, and I missed the call when the aircraft was trying to get back out, and they're the calls you don't want to miss. And I tell a funny story about how it was a credit card up down. The aircraft was flying out empty. The op center's credit card didn't pay for it. Was a million dollars for having the aircraft there. They rang me looking to use my company credit card for a million dollars, but during COVID, my CFO, Vanessa, is the CEO now. I put all of our limits down to $10,000 so I couldn't have paid for the diversion anyway. But those are the calls. And there was a release when I left in it, which I was on the other side of it, because it was the release of not having to worry about that, not having that obligation on you, and not having those calls, which I actually quite didn't like, by having when somebody's ringing you, it's a friend wanting a chat. It's not somebody that has a problem that you need to talk to them about. And usually those calls were all that. That was a release.