JetBlue Airways: Starting from Scratch In 1999, a group of experienced individuals in the airline industry came together to start a brand new company, JetBlue Airways. JetBlue decided that its strategy was going to be very similar to Southwest Airlines (low cost airline), but focus more on technology by providing the customer with a better experience and ensure more productivity from the aircraft. The company decided that its home base was going to be JFK, with a potential of 2.5 million passengers living within just 10 miles. JetBlue would start with a fleet of brand new Airbus A320s and have to recruit a whole support organization to run the operation.
Key Factors for JetBlue to Be Successful The biggest key for JetBlue to be successful is developing a dominant culture. JetBlue accomplished this by defining their core values of safety, caring, integrity, fun, and passion. These are the ground work for the company because it represents “the bedrock for the development of human resource policy and practices and management style”. These values will influence how the rest of the business will be run as subcultures will eventually be defined by other parts of the organization. This could be from supervisors making day to day decision and HR in hiring decisions. As long as the company is aware of these values and ensures that this is part of the day to day business culture – they are off to a good start.
JetBlue also needs to become an innovator and risk taker to carry through on its core competencies of leveraging technology. This will ensure its promise to create a better customer experience than other competing airlines in order to continue to differentiate itself. It will need to, for example, continue to operationalize the 30-minute turnaround process as it gets bigger and flies to new airports. This is all part of the outcome and team