February 25, 2007

Sumser strikes Salary scratch

David Manaster does the math and finds John Sumser about half-a-million richer now! Congratulations John!

February 21, 2007

Love the Customer

I've learned a lot over the years from David Neeleman, he really loves the customer....

UPDATE: Mr. Shafrir sends this excellent apology e-mail from the CEO.... one of the best I've seen for its humility and its feeling that they are really truly sorry....

Dear JetBlue Customers,

We are sorry and embarrassed. But most of all, we are deeply sorry.

Last week was the worst operational week in JetBlue's seven year history. As a customer scheduled to be on one of our flights during this period, we know we let you down. Following the severe winter ice storm in the Northeast, we subjected you to unacceptable delays, flight cancellations, lost baggage, and other major inconveniences. The storm disrupted the movement of aircraft, and, more importantly, disrupted the movement of JetBlue's pilot and inflight crewmembers who were depending on those planes to get them to the airports where they were scheduled to serve you. With the busy President's Day weekend upon us, rebooking opportunities were scarce and hold times at 1-800-JETBLUE were unacceptably long or not even available, further hindering our recovery efforts.

Words cannot express how truly sorry we are for the anxiety, frustration and inconvenience that you experienced. This is especially saddening because JetBlue was founded on the promise of bringing humanity back to air travel and making the experience of flying happier and easier for everyone who chooses to fly with us. We know we failed to deliver on this promise to you last week.

We have begun implementing immediate corrective steps to regain your confidence in us as part of a comprehensive plan to provide better and more timely information to you, more tools and resources for our crewmembers and improved procedures for handling operational difficulties in the future. We are confident, as a result of these actions, that JetBlue will emerge as a more reliable and even more customer responsive airline than ever before.

Most importantly, we have published the JetBlue Airways Customer Bill of Rights—our official commitment to you of how we will handle operational interruptions going forward—including details of compensation. I have a video message to share with you about this industry leading action.

You deserved better—a lot better—from us last week. Nothing is more important than regaining your trust and all of us here hope you will give us the opportunity to once again welcome you onboard and provide you the positive JetBlue Experience you have come to expect from us.

Sincerely,
David Neeleman
Founder and CEO
JetBlue Airways

February 19, 2007

HotJobs summer party 2001

I found an old colleague's photos of the HotJobs Summer Party 2001 on Flickr.

Highlight: a shot of Jeff Taylor, CEO of Monster.com sporting a nifty HotJobs tattoo! (This was during the time after we'd agreed to sell to Monster, but before Yahoo's ultimately successful competing bid.)

Newspapers

John Battelle mentions that YellowPages.com Gets It.

I had a similar experience with a Top Ten Newspaper recently. They asked me my advice on what they could do with their recruitment classifieds and website.

When I mentioned that they should have a feature that reviewed the job-seeking process from a job-seeker's perspective, and name names on which employers had the best and worst application process, the first, almost reflexive, response was "what if it's an advertiser?"

The papers are in tough shape, and protecting their old business is preventing them from grabbing the new one.

An Inspiration

Andy Monfried quotes a Dead tune and inspires me in the same post. How much does that rock?

Read it here: You ain't gonna learn what you don't want to know