From Worst to First: Behind the Scenes of Continental's Remarkable Comeback

Chapter 8. How the Sickest Patients Need the Best Doctors, and concerning Tapeworms

After I took over as chief executive of Continental Airlines, as you can well imagine, we had quite a turnover in the executive ranks.

I've already told you about the forced ranking we did for all management employees during my first year as CEO, which made the difficult job of thinning the ranks somewhat easier. At the top, the job wasn't much different.

Of the 61 Continental vice presidents working here when I took over, about half quit or were asked to leave. We never really had a purge—but we kept turning over rocks, and if we found people who weren't doing their jobs or weren't team players, they didn't stay. And those who did seem to be doing all right didn't always want to stick with us when they saw how we did things.

But we were changing our spots big-time here, and in order to be different you have to want to be different. People who were pulling in good salaries doing poor jobs for a floundering company didn't always want to suddenly have to work harder to do a good job in order to make a good company. No problem; we asked those people to leave, and people around them knew exactly why.

Managers were let go here for two reasons: Either they weren't getting the job done, according to the measurements we put in place to determine that, or they weren't team players. Those were the new rules at Continental: Get your job done and work together. If you couldn't or wouldn't do either one of those ...