SFGate ran a great interview with David Neeleman, CEO of JetBlue. It’s an honest look at his failure in university, his Mormon upbringing, and his take on fundamental airline operations.

I recently noticed with delight their new ad campaign, We like you, too (contrast this with Google’s Do no evil. It’s a different stance that brings different results.). It’s a little cocky, but gets to the heart of what they want to do: make customers happy. And we hear this explicitly from Neeleman:

Let’s just treat people nice. Sometimes people don’t deserve to be treated nice. But let’s just do it anyway, because that’s just the way we want to do business. And so we talk a lot about that kind of stuff.

He extends this attitude toward employees too. He defends his anti-union stance by trying to treat employees better than a union would. Last year the profit sharing program resulted in 17% bonuses.

Link courtesy of Kottke.