And Now the Hard Part

Neeleman likes to say that the airline's TVs are overrated, that the real secret weapon is the employees, all of whom are called "crewmembers" to emphasize the companywide sense of teamwork. If you treat people well, the company's philosophy goes, they'll treat the customer well. "There is no 'they' here," says Al Spain, senior vice president of operations. "It's 'we' and 'us.' We succeed together or we fail together."

JetBlue's staff isn't unionized. While insisting that he's not against unions, Neeleman makes it clear that he would prefer to avoid them. If management and crewmembers trust one another and if people feel they're compensated fairly (last year's 17% profit sharing certainly helped), he believes that there's no need for a third party. And the crewmembers are more likely to stick by the company in tough times.

One challenge for a rapidly growing company is stoking the fires of new and old employees, the ones who are just joining the company and haven't been exposed to the culture and the ones who have been with the airline for years. You keep both groups excited, Barger says, by making them realize how much their contributions matter.

Take the pilots. At most airlines, they're seen as one-dimensional technicians, says Bushy, the VP of flight operations. He prods JetBlue pilots to participate in the business. One pilot creates elaborate airport diagrams to help orient colleagues. Another pitches in doing financial analysis for the company. And another is making an inventory of her fellow pilots' skills in hope of identifying other abilities that might be useful to the airline.

One of the reasons Neeleman and Barger have been so effective at building a dedicated staff is that their visibility is no gimmick. They're not making pronouncements from the corner office. David and Dave, as they're known to crewmembers, are out cultivating and championing the culture on the front lines. In addition to flying JetBlue most weeks, they appear together at nearly every first day of orientation for new hires. They conduct monthly "pocket sessions," informal Q&As with crewmembers.

As JetBlue's planes and cities multiply, though, Neeleman and Barger will no doubt seem less visible, simply because they can't be everywhere. To combat creeping management anonymity, each officer is assigned one of the airline's destinations, a "Blue City." Once a quarter, he or she visits that operation to meet with crewmembers and work alongside them. The visits help employees in the field form working ties to executives at headquarters. "Not many companies have the kind of culture where you're a customer-service rep and you can pick up the phone and call a VP at the company and get their ear right away," says Vinny Stabile, vice president of people.

All this effort isn't just to make employees feel good (or even to keep them from unionizing). Ultimately, it's about building a system that consistently delivers a better experience to passengers. And that may well be critical to JetBlue's survival. Despite plenty of evidence that the cost of a ticket is what matters most to airline passengers, Neeleman believes that JetBlue can compete on more than price. In some markets, its passengers are willing to pay fares that average $20 more than on American and Song. Ordinarily, upstart carriers duke it out in bare-knuckled price wars. Neeleman's betting his airline that good service, delivered by passionate employees, will give JetBlue a lasting edge.

But as JetBlue grows, it relies more and more on employees who weren't there in the beginning, when the entire staff could fit in one room. They weren't in the crisis center on September 11, scrambling to find shuttle buses and hotel rooms for stranded passengers. They weren't at JFK during the blackout in 2003, when employees armed with little more than flashlights worked around the clock to make sure most flights took off. They haven't been through the experiences that bind a staff together.

That's why preserving the culture increasingly requires conscious effort, starting with orientation. On the first day, Barger explains the JetBlue brand, and Neeleman teaches how the company makes money and how each employee contributes to the bottom line. "Our people have business literacy," says Bushy. And they care, in large part because the numbers affect their profit sharing.

He's supposed to be on vacation. That's what Neeleman tells the few dozen employees gathered in a training room at JetBlue University in Forest Hills, New York. He had promised his family a long weekend in Florida. When he drove them to the airport, though, he put them on a plane and headed to work. He'll join them tomorrow. Neeleman doesn't want sympathy. He simply wants the group to know how important he considers them and their training. On the first day of the program, Principles of Leadership (POL), Neeleman leads a session called "Why are you here?" It also explains why he's here.