P.O. Box 53055    
Los Angeles, CA 90053   

TARES AND TUCSON TROUBLEMAKERS

“Is this any way to run an airline?” was the headline in a major U.S. news magazine. An upstart billionaire named Danny had gotten himself into the aviation business after riding the NASDAQ roller coaster right to its peak and then climbing out with his winnings. Securing just four planes at first, and beginning with just three puddle-jumper routes on the west coast, he had astonished the industry by expanding to 30 states in just over three years. With Danny — and by the way, that’s what he had every single one of his nine thousand employees call him — service was key. You served your people, you served your travelers, you served the people standing in line, you served the people who logged onto your website to make reservations, you served the people with complaints on the rare occasion when one of Sky High’s planes left the gate more than three minutes behind schedule.

And you just never knew when you would actually see the Big Guy himself: checking luggage in at Portland; giving you an upgrade in Albuquerque, going up and down the aisles of the plane between Sacramento and Colorado Springs pouring out cans of soda and giving his customers the promised cookies. “Don’t tell the boss,” he’d say, slipping extra ones to the kids. “I don’t want to get fired.”

“You ARE the boss!” they would squeal with laughter.

“I am?” He looked pleased with himself. “Cool!” They loved it.

Well, the general public ate it up too — not just the cookies, but the whole concept Sky High was promoting. No more Saturday night stayover rules; no more crazy patchwork fares; no extra fees if your meetings in Dallas got done half a day early and you wanted to get home ahead of schedule. “Sure,” Danny would say, writing you up a new boarding pass himself. “Let’s get you home, mister, and free up a seat on that later flight. Maybe I’ll meet a pretty girl on that airplane, marry her, and let her fly for half price after that.” Then he’d laugh, and everyone standing in line would laugh too. “Isn’t this fun?” he would grin. “Man, we’re building us a kingdom of joy here. We’re Sky High and happy.”

Danny’s #2 at the airline was a guy named Pete, who was in charge of keeping the whole operation running smoothly. There was hardly ever even a ripple of employee discontent, but if someone had a question or suggestion about morale, Pete would zip off an e-mail and fix it. He did a corporate newsletter each month, and there was always a Q&A section where people who worked at Sky High, from the glass-tower offices to the men and women out on the tarmac, putting suitcases on the planes, could have their say. It was Pete’s job to make sure that Danny’s slogan, “We’re Sky High and happy,” always stayed true.

Then one day Pete came into his boss’s office and shut the door. “We got ourselves a situation,” he said without fanfare.

“What’s up?” Danny asked him.

Pete shook his head. “Don’t know how to tell you this,” he said, “but Sky High’s got itself a small bunch of subversives. Working undercover.”

Danny took his cowboy boots off the mahogany desk and sat up straight. “No way,” he said. “What are you talking about, Pete?”

The shorter man took out a folder and ran his finger down a list. “The way I’ve been counting on my fingers,” he said, “between our operation in Tucson and a little group of people in Oakland, there are just about 20 people on the payroll this very minute who are trying to do us in from the inside.”

“How come?” The CEO couldn’t believe it. “We’re going so good. What are they grumping about?”

“They’re not grumping out loud,” Pete corrected him. “If they had complaints they know they could come to you or me, or use the newsletter to sound off, or just come to the next roundtable meeting, or whatever. And we’d do our best to fix it. It’s nothing like that. It’s just that these employees have decided to poison the well from inside the well, hoping to send us down the tubes. Whether they have underground connections to some other airline and are helping to sabotage us on their behalf, I don’t know. Doesn’t matter, though. I’ve got confidential memos from supervisors, I’ve got backups of certain e-mails that have been sent around, I have friends who have tipped me off to some real monkeying around with reservations . . . and I can just tell you, Big Guy, these people are costing us a severe amount of income. And it’s only going to get worse.”

There was a stab of pain which showed on the owner’s face as he digested the news. “Man, that hurts,” he said at last. “We tried to make something unique happen here, create a family for these folks.”

“It still is,” Pete said hastily. “Look, boss, Sky High is still THE airline to work for. Wall Street says so; I mean, our stock is just two points off our all-time high of 82. We’re still okay that way. But in the long run, there’s no doubt about it — this little bunch of malcontents are cyanide. And what’s penny-ante now might get bigger if they recruit others.”

Danny got up from the desk and walked over to the big picture window looking out over the huge multi-million dollar slab of concrete where Sky High jets took off and landed every day. “So our investors, and the crowd at CNBC . . . don’t really know this is brewing.”

“Nope. From all outward appearances we’re still one big cookie-eating happy family. The way these 20 bad apples are operating, they still look as good as the other apples in the barrel. You’d never know by looking.” The diminutive vice president walked over and stood next to his mentor. “So what are we going to do, Danny?”

The older man turned to face him. “What do you think? You’ve been with me ever since the startup. I mean, we built this puppy from the ground up, you and me. It’s your family too, bro. What’s your call?”

Pete scratched at his goatee. “You got no choice, man. Pink slips. You gotta fire ‘em. Like, right now. Get the pus out of the wound before an infection sets in. I call them, I tell them they’ve got two weeks, and sayonara.”

A 747 jet thundered past, on its way to a distant paradise, and Danny watched as it rose into the air heading west. Very slowly he came back to his desk, sat down, poured himself a drink of water, and sipped at it, his face expressionless. A minute passed in silence.

“Well?” Pete prompted him. “So I can them? Or what?”

“No.” Danny shook his head. “This is Sky High, Pete. Don’t fire them.”

“But I’m telling you, these people are bad news,” Pete protested. “The competition slid them onto our game board when we weren’t looking, and they’re going to wipe us out.”

“No, they’re not,” the CEO said calmly. “We’re still Sky High. We’re not going to get beat by twenty renegade workers in Tucson and Oakland.”

“But what are you going to do?”

Danny looked right at him. “I’m going to wait,” he told him. “Let some time go by.”

“How come?”

The airline’s owner pointed at the wall where there was a huge photo showing about 350 smiling employees standing around one of the company’s brand new AirBus jets. “Look,” he said. “We’re a young company. Wall Street still calls us an upstart. And now, out of nine thousand employees, we’ve got 20 or so who got planted in our yard by some enemy.”

“So we pull ‘em out right now.” Pete was still determined to have a showdown. “Get them by the roots and yank.”

“No,” Danny said firmly. “Not yet. We fire 20 people now, right in the middle of the peak summer season, we’ll lose others for sure. It’ll dominate the headlines. When we ax the bad workers, we’ll uproot some of the good employees at the same time. Plus,” he said, “how can you know for sure, Pete, that you’ve got a handle on exactly who the renegades are? What if there are others, and because we didn’t know, they stay on? Then we look unfair.”

Pete shook his head in frustration. “This is nuts,” he said. “These guys are going to contaminate everything. You can’t just let them sit in front of our computer terminals, infecting our whole corporation like a virus.”

Danny came over and put an arm around his friend. “Pete,” he said quietly, “I’ll handle it. When the time comes, I promise you, I’ll take care of it. There’s going to be a huge shakeup anyway, in this crazy flying business. And we’re going to end up on top. I know that and you know that. That’s why we’ve stuck together. And I promise you, in the end, we’re going to have our family whole again. The enemy troops are going to be gone.”

“Are you sure?”

The president of Sky High Airlines nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m sure.”