The Pilot-In-Chief, Señor Muñoz, Comes to Town

By | Por HERNÁN GUARACAO | Founder, Editor-in-Chief & CEO

This Op-Ed was published by AL DIA News 5 years ago, written at that time by our Editor-In-Chief Hernán Guaracao Calderón. Because it is relevant to last week’s visit to Philadelphia of former CEO & Chairman of United Airlines, Mr. Oscar Muñoz — who spoke to a half-empty Grand Lincoln Hall at the Union League of Philadelphia. It was written after the two took this selfie, Mr. Guaracao and Mr. Muñoz, as they met for the first time in Chicago in 2018 at the end of an event held by the Latino Corporate Directors Association ( LCDA).

This past week I learned one secret for success from the CEO of a large corporation in America — one that has experienced exponential growth over the past three years, largely because of his unique leadership style.

His name is Oscar Muñoz, current CEO of United Airlines — the third largest airline in the world, with 86,000 employees and a market capitalization of $21 billion.

Oscar is a descendant of immigrants, exactly like the rest of us.

Muñoz, as his last name was spelled out in Mexico by his ancestor, is now Munoz, losing the “ñ” in the immense space of his corporate universe.

For those senior Latino leaders listening to him last week at the Latino Corporate Directors Association (LCDA), he was, again, our “Muñoz”— or, simply “Oscar” as some of us naturally ended up calling him during a reside chat conversation, as close as we felt listening to him.

“A company is most pro table when it is principled,” he said.

In other words, principled practices generate the most pro table results in a corporation.

Pro ts follow Principles. Philosophy supersedes Business. Ethics guarantees Success.

It starts with the man at the helm, of course, whose ultimate responsibility is to set the direction North, to maneuver the moral compass for all to follow.

And it ends with the company’s accountant, who prepares the quarterly statements with the nal Pro t and Loss gures — a sort of performance score re ecting the scrupulous standards set by the captain, in this case the man in the cockpit.

Oscar walks that high altitude ight deck with 11,000 pilots under his command, with great con dence. As a eld commander, a General George Meade of both “Heaven and Earth.”

For him, as he puts it, his job is “just a platform to make the world better.” e secrets of success, I thought — after hearing Oscar speak for close to an hour about “Driving Innovation & Results” — are very much public.

Oscar was Fortune Magazine’s Person of the year in 2016, not long a er surviving a heart attack and heart transplant — before a miracle comeback two months later, when the world saw a recovered and emboldened leader post a 44% growth for United stock, beating other mega-carriers like Delta Airlines and American Airlines.

“ e climate for managements-by-values has never been more promising,” writes Daryl Travis.

Despite the discouraging headlines from our current national politics, our society is quietly but surely moving in a new direction in this information age.

Our “Millennials” — half of them of Latino descent — will shape and re ne these values and make them the foundation of our progress for many decades to come.z