All companies stumble; great companies show their colors when all looks blackest.  JetBlue showed theirs when an ice storm on Valentine’s Day 2007 paralyzed them and many other carriers. For a number of reasons, JetBlue got most of the media attention. This OPED appeared a week later. There is a detailed account of this incident in Chapter Nineteen of Play Nice, Make Money, including a published interview with Jenny Dervin, Director of Corporate Communications, JetBlue Airways.

Bulldog Reporter

JetBlue has a Johnson & Johnson Moment

By: W.T. "Bill" MckIbben

It was the best of weeks and the worst of weeks for JetBlue. They were one of the 28 companies that made the final cut into Firms of Endearment. The long awaited book identifies the very best companies in the country based on a range of standards that we should all be striving for. The book was released on February 9^th and just 5 days later the airline was mired in a customer service nightmare. Flights at New York’s JFK airport were snarled in an ice storm that ended up leaving JetBlue and other airlines grid locked.

Two factors thrust JetBlue into the forefront of the public relations maelstrom. They are a major player at JFK, so they had a lot of flights enmeshed in the situation. The second factor was a bad judgment call. They bet on the weather getting better. That would allow their flights to take off, albeit late. The alternative was to unload the passengers at the gate and cancel the flights. They lost the bet. The result: they sent planes full of passengers away from the gates to wait on the tarmac for as much as nine hours.

As the storm settled in, the situation was complicated by the glut of planes on the ground. The freezing rain encased everything. The tractors used to move planes around literally froze to the pavement. Meanwhile aboard the planes the snack foods were gone, the bathrooms were kaput, and the passengers were hot physically & emotionally. JetBlue was simply overwhelmed. The domino effect carried on for days. Crews and aircraft were scattered across the system in all the wrong places.

It seemed that JetBlue couldn’t do anything right. However, they did one thing exactly right. From the very beginning they took full responsibility for the mess. Their Founder and CEO, David Neeleman, was out front day one taking the heat. There was no whining, no legal department dancing.

Five days into the event, the New York Times reported, “Neeleman, his voice cracking at times, called himself ‘humiliated and mortified’.”  On the sixth day, with all flights up and running, the JetBlue Chairman made the rounds of the media with a plan in place to deal with future catastrophic events.

JetBlue will recover. That’s what good companies do when things go wrong. They do the right thing and they recover. Like all good companies their values are rooted at the top and they run throughout the organization. As Neeleman noted on CNN’s American Morning, “It’s not really what happens to you, it’s how you react to it.”

A quarter century ago Johnson & Johnson (another one of the 28 companies that made the final cut into Firms Of Endearment) became a public relations icon with their response to the Tylenol tragedy. My money is on JetBlue to be the next Poster Child. Wouldn’t it be nice if these common sense responses became commonplace? Nothing stands in the way of that goal but finding the courage to do the right thing no matter how bad things look.

Bill McKibben is Senior Partner, Business Ethics Practice, with The Great Lakes Group in Buffalo, New York. His Book, Play Nice, Make Money, will be published this spring. You can contact him at 716.883.4695 or Bill@McKibben.com.