Outthinkers #129—Oscar Munoz: United's Strategic Revival Through Employee Empowerment
Oscar Munoz, is the former CEO and Chairman of United Airlines. Oscar has led an accomplished career, spanning senior financial positions at Coca-Cola, Pepsico, AT&T, and US West. He also served as President and COO of North American rail-based transportation giant CSX Corp. He is also an independent trustee for Fidelity and a CNBC Contributor.
A first-generation college graduate with degrees from the University of Southern California and Pepperdine, he was twice honored by Hispanic Business Magazine as one of its ‘100 Most Influential Hispanics’, honoring his journey as an immigrant who is the first person of Hispanic heritage to run a U.S. airline.
In this conversation, we get to glean Oscar’s incredible insights from his Wall Street Journal best-selling memoir, Turnaround Time: Uniting an Airline and its Employees in the Friendly Skies. Having joined United, he had quite a task ahead of him, uniting the very fragmented workforce the airline faced at the time. At the core of this immense turnaround was Oscar’s steadfast belief, that employees are as important as customers and shareholders in ensuring a business succeeds.
In this podcast we discuss:
- His journey throughout his career that brought him to United, and the insightful takeaways on leadership he gleaned along the way
- His human-first approach in taking over the reins, which put each and every employee at the core of United transformation
- The Core4 policy that emphasizes each employee operate by the four pillars of safe, caring, dependable and efficient, emphasizing the human part of customer service over business objectives
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Episode Timeline:
00:00—Highlight from today's episode
01:14—Introducing Oscar+ the topic of today’s episode
04:45—If you really know me, you know that...
05:52— How Oscar's core values were shaped
07:32—What is your definition of strategy
13:11—Oscar gives insights into how he became CEO of United
19:22— Oscar steps into the CEO role
24:12— Economic factors shaping airline strategy
26:58—The Core4 policy as a strategy for growth
35:12— Bottom-up leadership: building a company from the employee level
38:10—How can people follow you and continue learning from you?
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Additional Resources:
Personal website: oscar-munoz.com
Link to book: Turnaround Time
Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/oscarmunozua
Instagram: www.instagram.com/oscarmunoz
Thank you to our guests, thank you to our executive producer, Karina Reyes, our editor, Zach Ness, and the rest of the team. If you like what you heard, please follow, download, and subscribe. I'm your host, Kaihan Krippendorff. Thank you for listening.
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