Ethics Newsline®

Her name was Pat, and in my book she was Wednesday’s heroine. That was the day the ice storm hit the Northeast last week — just as I was making my way home from Texas to Maine. It was a day that needed heroines as the sorry tales of passengers stranded by JetBlue made clear.

Fortunately, I was on US Airways. My first flight got me as far as Charlotte, North Carolina, where the flight monitor screens in the terminal were ablaze with red-lettered cancellations. I stood three-deep in a customer service line until I got to Pat’s desk.

As a passenger, you always think your story is unique. Nevertheless, she listened sympathetically as I explained my circumstances: my flight to Portland, Maine, cancelled; my suitcase already checked through; an indelible commitment to speak the following afternoon at a college campus in Maine; and no direct flights to Portland until the following night.

Undaunted, she set to work on her computer cheerfully, motherly, with great energy and complete mastery of the system. As we were looking at possibilities for rebooking on other airlines — or for luggageless overnighting along the East Coast — her eye fell on a long-delayed flight to Boston. She grabbed a ticket and requested a rerouting for my bag. Along the way, with the line thinning behind me, she asked the next person to step over to her colleague’s desk. I would be her last customer in what had been, she noted almost casually, a 12-hour shift that would be repeated for her the next day.

What made Pat so special? She had just the bundle of talents and virtues needed in that situation: a sense of grace under pressure, a confident facility with the systems, an empathy for those in need that overrode any self-pity, and a failure-is-not-an-option perseverance. That night, she was the right person to be, as my military friends like to say, at the pointy end of the spear.

But what made her effective was the rest of the spear — the entire system lying behind her, many-layered and flexible, that let her work her keyboard magic and spirit me to a Boston hotel and (though still without luggage) to an on-time appearance the next day. Behind Pat stood thousands of employees I never saw, all building on their accumulated traditions of managing smoothly in times of stress.

Contrast my simple tale of success with the harrowing devastations of JetBlue, the low-cost carrier that, until last Wednesday, was the industry leader in customer-satisfaction ratings. After stranding passengers inside planes at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport for up to ten-and-a-half hours, JetBlue endured rolling waves of cancellations for the next five days that grounded about 1,000 flights. Flight attendants and pilots were stranded far from planes that needed them, with schedulers not sure where they were or how to contact them. The reservation system was overwhelmed and at times dysfunctional. Mounds of misplaced bags piled up. Meanwhile JetBlue founder and CEO David G. Neeleman — who to his credit was accessible, forthright, and horrified — was described by a New York Times reporter as admitting that “the company’s management lacked depth in operations.”

Put that way, JetBlue’s problems appear to be simply the result of poor strategic decisions. In a sense that’s true: Their low-cost structure had thinned management ranks, leaving little room for dealing with the unexpected. But stranding tens of thousands of travelers, many of them parents with children, starting long-planned vacations during the Presidents Day school holidays? This isn’t just a business failure; it’s a moral calamity. Permitting the creation of a system that fails so pervasively — even, for some families, irreversibly — isn’t just bad management; it is profoundly unethical.

If that sounds strange, reflect that ours is an age hell-bent on reclassifying corporate failings as bad business decisions rather than as lapses in integrity. We’ve almost forgotten a virtue often discussed by our ancestors, something they called prudence. My dictionary defines it as “wisdom in the way of caution and provision,” involving “discretion, carefulness, sagacity,” and noting its relationship to foresight and forethought.

What JetBlue lacked, it seems, was a conditioned sense of prudence. Operating merrily in normal times, it created no systematic capacity for handling stress. In that, it’s not alone. Its problems are emblematic of a world chasing low-cost alternatives. As Wal-Mart has proved, the pressure on price is not all bad, squeezing out excess profits and delivering an array of products to people who never could have afforded them in the past. But that pressure also has produced a customer base too easily tempted by surface appearances rather than inner substance. With an airline, where the substance involves high levels of technical and logistical complexity invisible to the buyer, it’s easy to be tempted by cheap tickets, leather seats, and colloquial announcements.

The answer? There are two, one bad and one good. The bad one is to let government intervene, regulate every fare and every business decision, and drive up costs. When ethics collapses this badly, the pressure builds for replacing open competition with controlling legalities, market forces with intervention, and self-regulation with law. The better answer is to let customers force the JetBlues of the world to install the necessary back-up systems, even at the cost of higher fares. Given the airline’s embarrassments this past week, such new-found prudence is probably on its way.

©2007 Institute for Global Ethics