Fast Talk: One Shrewd Move

Jeffrey G. Katz

Chairman, president, and CEO, Orbitz Inc.
Chicago, Illinois
The travel industry is going through a deep transformation. There's never been a time like this. The industry lost an estimated $7 billion last year, and it will lose the same this year.

When it comes to airlines, Southwest Airlines is now the competition for everyone. Lower costs are the basic goal of every airline. I like to say that we're the Southwest of distribution: If you want access to the market at the lowest possible cost, that's Orbitz.

At first, we aimed that promise at leisure travelers. Our smartest move this year was to launch a corporate product. We discovered that about 25% of Orbitz customers were using us for business. It was clear that we could take this great leisure model and make it work for business fliers, so we launched Orbitz for Business. We have a full-service travel agency as backup, but everything can be done online: Your assistant can book individual or group travel; the system can apply corporate discounts; itinerary dates can be sent back to the company.

Launching Orbitz for Business was a big move for us. We've done more than $2 billion in leisure-travel bookings, and our forecasts indicate that during the next four or five years, our business bookings will equal that of our leisure bookings. The economic environment is difficult for everyone, but it's a great time to be an industry transformer.

Jeffrey G. Katz has been CEO of Orbitz since its founding in November 1999. The site was started by American, Continental, Delta, Northwest, and United. Prior to joining Orbitz, Katz was CEO of Swissair.

Carole Black

President and CEO
Lifetime Entertainment Services
New York, New York
It's been a tough couple of years in the television business. For Lifetime, though, 2001 was our best year ever -- and this year should top it. Our strong business performance reflects the strength of the Lifetime brand, which is a function of the loyalty of our viewers. I'm convinced that a big part of that loyalty is a response to our tradition of advocacy for women. Our mission is to entertain, support, and inform women in ways that are relevant to their lives.

Perhaps the biggest risk that we took this year -- and it turned out to be the smartest move that we made -- was to make a major commitment to our Stop Violence Against Women campaign. Last February, during the ratings sweep, all of our original programming addressed issues of violence against women. I warned top management that we were going to make this commitment and that we'd probably get hurt in the ratings. People use TV for escapism, and sweeps are always a tough period for cable channels, given all of the high-profile programs on the networks.

Instead, we had our best February ever. It's just like my grandmother taught me: If you do the right thing, you'll be rewarded. Our commitment to this kind of programming strengthened our viewers' commitment to us.

Carole Black has been president and CEO of Lifetime Entertainment Services since March 1999. During her tenure, Lifetime Television has become the number-one-rated network among basic-cable networks in prime-time programming.

Kerry Killinger

Chairman, President, and CEO
Washington Mutual Inc.
Seattle, Washington
The smartest thing that we did was to stay focused on our long-term strategic plan, which meant growing the company when many others became conservative. Our long-term plan is to create the nation's leading retailer of consumer financial services. We're always designing new products and finding better ways to meet growing demand for financial services, but this year, we took three big steps toward that goal.

First, we entered the New York - New Jersey market. If we wanted to be America's leading consumer bank, then we had to get into New York. We entered through acquisition and put a special emphasis on seeding our brand in that market and getting our new employees used to doing business the Washington Mutual way.

Second, we are now America's leading home lender. We acquired a number of companies over the past two years to achieve this and spent this year completing the integration of those companies.

Third, I visited more than 20,000 employees. With the aftermath of September 11, this was an important year to do that. I wanted to communicate what strategies we have in place, what the core values of the company are, and what our brand stands for.

Kerry Killinger has been CEO of Washington Mutual Inc. since 1990.