And Now the Hard Part

POL is a sort of midflight correction -- a response to some troubling evidence that JetBlue's culture was already starting to stray off course. In a 2002 staff survey, one-third of respondents voiced unhappiness about their supervisors. To their dismay, Neeleman and Barger discovered they were promoting people without teaching them how to manage. Employees griped about bosses whose abrasive style and favoritism undermined the environment that David and Dave had nurtured.

The answer was POL, a five-day program taught by senior executives for managers at every level, from VP to first officer. The idea is to reinforce and transmit the key elements of JetBlue's culture by teaching attendees to practice the five primary principles: "Treat your people right," "Communicate with your team," "Inspire greatness in others," "Encourage initiative and innovation," and "Do the right thing." "POL is designed to create leaders that understand what I would do if I were there," says Spain, the operations chief. "They're not clones, but I want them to understand the foundations of the business, the principles we built the company on, and the leadership principles."

JetBlue's senior leaders tell stories to illustrate those principles -- stories that often have to do with flexibility or circumventing barriers. When is it okay to break the rules? Spain describes how a JetBlue pilot bought a couple of dozen McDonald's Happy Meals for kids when his plane was stuck on the ground. The fast-food run may have been unorthodox, but he did the right thing.

Make no mistake, though: POL is all about helping JetBlue scale. Graduates become "anointed proprietors of the culture," says Stabile. "Instead of 25 officers, you have 800 people in leadership positions throughout the company who believe in this culture." Most carry a copy of the principles with their ID badge. "It's our crewmembers' bill of rights," says Neeleman.

And it's values like those taught in POL that, in turn, attract people like Bonny Simi. She's one of the hardest sort of people for JetBlue to sign on, an experienced pilot working for a major airline. If pilots switch airlines, they start over, at the bottom rung of seniority. But Simi, a captain at United for 12 years (and three-time Olympic luge slider), wanted to be more engaged with an airline, more inspired.

Wary of a young, unproven airline, she researched the company for six months. The values mirrored her own, but she wanted to be sure they weren't just talk, and that it would be worth taking a big pay cut. She read business-school case studies and SEC filings. She contacted Michael Lazarus, then chairman of JetBlue's board, and grilled him. "This is the next 20 years of my life," she says. "I had to be sure."

Several months into the job, Simi routinely sends Bushy ideas on how to improve safety and standardization. Recently, she walked into the office of Collins, the vice president of system operations, without an appointment to pitch an idea on pilot reports. "Did I feel valued that I had an idea and a vice president here said, 'I like it'? Definitely. That was so cool. Does that inspire me to come up with other ideas to make this a better airline? In a major way."

At half past midnight in Salt Lake City, Neeleman looks as grounded as you could get. Dress shirt untucked, eyes rimmed red, he's coming down the aisle of the Airbus A320, his arms wrapped around a bundle of blankets and pillows. All JetBlue employees help clean a plane when it lands. Another cost averted: no cleaning crew. But like other practices at JetBlue, it serves a symbolic purpose as well. The work transcends job titles. Pilots don rubber gloves to empty seatbacks. Staffers traveling on their day off pitch in, too. And so does the visiting CEO.

In his own way, Neeleman does scale. Like JetBlue, he's retaining certain qualities while evolving. He's not the brash, impatient thirtysomething entrepreneur who thought he had all the answers at Southwest. He's a 44-year-old big-company executive in the making.

He's still a man on a mission -- to continually improve the product, the JetBlue experience -- and he still has an uncanny ability to rally other people to that mission. But he also says he's not as hands-on as he used to be. He understands his role. "I'm not the guy to oversee the day to day," he says. "That's Dave Barger. He loves that. I'm looking for the new deal, the new technology. My passion is making sure our product stays fresh and exciting and that we keep our costs low."

Not day to day, perhaps. But Neeleman can't resist checking, tweaking, reaching out. He logs on to the airline's Web site and books a flight to Buffalo to find out if the extra leg room is being promoted enough (it's not). He calls the operations department to find out what's being done for passengers on a plane that was struck by lightning and delayed for six hours (not enough). He also makes time to call a flight attendant he knows who collapsed on a flight the day before (she's fine).