How to manage a crisis with ex United Airlines Chief of Comms, Jim Olson

20:14Jim Olsen:Now, the recovery rate for the cyber cancer you had for normal chemotherapy would be quite low. Am I right in saying that? But you had immunotherapy, didn't you, which is a different kind of treatment. That had consequences as well, didn't it? I mean, in the medical world, timing's everything, right? I told my wife not to do it, but she did anyway. She Googled like the survival rate of stage four melanoma cancer. And I said, don't do it. I don't know. And she still told me, she goes, you have probably a 20 % chance of survival. Because those were the historical rates prior to 2018 when immunotherapy was approved by the FDA.

20:55And that's the, I have a fantastic oncologist as part of the, it's the Woodlands Cancer Institute north of Houston. and he was very aggressive in taking on the lung tumor with immunotherapy. And then they also discovered an inch and a half tumor on my brain, and they zapped that with radiation, which sounds a lot scarier than it really was, but one dose of that, and that was gone. So they effectively treated those. And immunotherapy, for those who don't know, it's kind of like, compared to chemo being like a 20th century nuclear bomb, you hear about all the horrific side effects of chemo. That's because chemo kills both the good and the bad cells.

21:30Immunotherapy actually just goes after the bad cells. So there are far fewer side effects.

21:36Jim Olsen:But of course, it did have a side effect on you, didn't it? Unfortunately, yes. The small print was accurate. So when you get to the treatment, there's about five pages of potential side effects. And one of them in my case was it can actually cause dramatic swings in blood pressure. And so on July 4th, so about six months after I started the immunotherapy treatment, everything's going great. The tumor on my brain was gone, the radiation had taken care of that. The tumor on my lung had shrunk from two and a half inches to less than an inch. I mean, I was literally like in American football, I was on the goal line.

22:10I mean, I could smell the finish line. I got so cocky and so arrogant. I went and got a tattoo on my right shoulder that said, do hard things. Like I thought I'd slayed this monster, right? And well, so that's my first advice to people is don't get a tattoo that says do hard things because the universe will give you something really hard. So I woke up while I was on a business trip in, um, up in Napa Valley, Santa Rosa with the airline I was working for at the time and went to call an Uber after our event. And, uh, my, my vision was just shy. It was like dilation drops had been put in my eyes and I just couldn't read my phone.

22:40And, uh, it just kind of cast, it just kind of got worse from there. And ultimately it was determined to be optic nerve damage that was, they don't know for sure. So I want to be a little careful here, not to do a direct link to immunotherapy, but they think that the swing and there was maybe a swing in blood pressure, which is a known side effect of immuno, caused a micro seizure or aneurysm that night, which I didn't even notice, and cut off blood or oxygen circulation in my brain, which shot my optic nerves. And here I am looking at you in a very blurry state right now, but I can still see

23:10Jim Olsen:you look great. Thank you. Now, of course, a lot of people would have been knocked back a long way by this, but you didn't let this situation stop you. And in fact, you've then gone on to write a book which come which has just come out yes called tailwind so congratulations on the book there's lots of very powerful wisdom in the book and in kind of inspiring stories in there as well um one one well there's there's many quotes i wanted to pick up on but the first one was you talk about cancer didn't make me weaker and blindness didn't make the world darker and what struck me about that was your mentality through this that you didn't see this as a setback and And in fact, even the name of the book, right?

23:51Jim Olsen:Because when I read the book Tailwind, I'm like, why didn't he call it Headwind? I mean, this guy's had a lot of headwinds against it, but he's calling it Tailwind. So explain to me a little bit about the mentality that you took to get through this situation. Yeah. And in hindsight, it's easy to say, like, oh, you're just approaching this so positively and all that. But I really need to be clear. I was not waking up every morning going, wow, this is great. Like, you know, there were so many mornings when I first got diagnosed with stage four, even though they were giving me positive outlooks with the immunotherapy.

24:24You just don't really, you talk to anyone, any doctors, there's no guarantees with this, right? So I was staring down the barrel before even the vision loss happened. I mean, I wasn't sure I'd even make it a year. And I would just sometimes go to bed at night just with these horrific thoughts. It was less about being scared of dying. It was more just, you know, being in my mid-50s. I was 55. Just my daughter hadn't even finished college. I wanted to be able to watch, see her life flourish. You know, all my friends around the world. I mean, just had so much left. A book wasn't even in my thoughts at that point.

24:53It was, I wouldn't, I didn't get cancer. Oh, I'm gonna go write a book. I was aviating. I was, that's where the aviation comes in. I just, I just wanted to stay alive so that I could figure out then what I was gonna do next. And sometimes I was just thinking of my sheets when the vision happened, it was horrific. It was, that was harder than the cancer in some ways because the immunotherapy, as I mentioned, really didn't have many, it didn't, other than like one episode of fatigue, didn't sideline me from my job. I was doing press conferences all around the country. And, um, but the vision like really just, um, I went into it like a, an emotional and physical nosedive and I felt like Sully, I literally felt like both engines had been just knocked out.

25:30And I wouldn't say I was in a depression mode, but I was definitely like, I would just pull the sheet over my head at night. I was, you know, shrinking my sheets and I had to make the choice each day. Am I going to get up or give up? And there were a lot of days where I just wanted to give up, but I just, you know, just something in me, a fire in me just kind of kept me going forward. And then the book kind of came a little bit longer. The book kind of became my occupational physical therapy to kind of get through this.

25:53Jim Olsen:I think if I think about the times, similar, not as dramatic as yours, but I broke my neck when I was in my 20s. I had a house fire. I've been knocked off my bike and, you know, taken a couple of years to recover from that. and each time those things happen you sort of lose your purpose for a while because suddenly like oh my life's not quite working in the way i thought it would um and it's so important in those situations isn't it to to kind of rediscover your purpose and and set a new course for yourself yeah well you know the the really fun part about the book and it wasn't i didn't really go into this way just kind of as i it was just like i said the darkness of the vision loss kind of these these just thoughts and ideas would come into my head probably with more clarity than if I had 20-20 vision.

26:41And one of the thoughts on a walk one morning, very early on as I was kind of building out the chapters, was you shouldn't make this book about you. It can't be the Jim Olson memoir. I mean, as much as I'd like to just tell stories about myself as a storyteller, I thought, you know what, if I really, truly, authentically want this book to be valuable to a lot of other people, it needs to be a mirror to their lives. And I need to have other people in this book, kind of like you, who you, like you didn't have cancer, but you had a broken, broken neck, right? So I wanted to have like these other, not really characters, but these other stories of just ordinary people who went through extraordinary crucibles in their life and came out the other side, not just surviving, but thriving and making their lives and lives of others better.

27:20And so one of the people I interviewed, just extraordinary story, he's a friend, he was a client of one of my friends, Daniel Jacobs, who is the middleweight boxing champion of the world in 2014. and he got diagnosed with spinal cancer right before he was about to win the championship and his doctor said, you can never fight again. Don't even think about it because you'll be paralyzed for life. And of course, once he got cured, what did he do? He's a boxer. He went back into the ring and got his championship. But he had this great quote when I interviewed him. He goes, Jim, he goes, in boxing and life, the fight is won before you step into the ring.

27:54and for boxers you don't win the fight you win by all the training all the trips to the gym all the miles you put in all the jump roping you do all the push-ups and the pull-ups and I think this was kind of true for me too like I kind of won this journey not I mean obviously a lot of medical and faith helped but I think I kind of went into this fight already my life was almost like a rough draft for this chapter my story even though I didn't know it so I was kind of prepared all these crises we talked about at United and U.S. Airways, I've been dealing with all these other crises that weren't really my crises, and it prepared me for the biggest crisis in my life.

28:31Jim Olsen:Yeah, that's so true, isn't it? And I love how you talk about doing the hard things as well, you know, and that's such an important point of this. Another thing that jumped out to me was you've got this lovely phrase, which I found very inspiring, which is, don't ask what if, ask yourself why not yes i think that's brilliant because that that plays back to this mentality point doesn't it because human nature you know that the kind of psychology is we feel pain twice as much as we feel gain we're hardwired as human beings to look out for danger it's very easy to write a long list of what could go wrong right as opposed to asking what uh why not well well think about it and all these individuals i i talked to in the book um are people who cast decide the what if and did the why not.

29:16Take Daniel the boxer I just mentioned, right? He could have gone down the list of what ifs and not gone back into boxing and never achieved his childhood dream of being the middleweight champion of the world. And myself, I had this opportunity to go to Africa with my family and be an executive in residence at this amazing university on the island of Mauritius and in Rwanda. And my wife and I and daughter, who was 14 at the time, we would just toss and turn at night. Once I kind of signed up for it, we're like, what did we just sign up for? We had a beautiful house in the North Shore of Chicago.

29:45And we went through the whole list of what ifs every day. Like, well, what if we can't sell our house? What if we get there? This is before the pandemic and there's like, we have a major health crisis. But we ultimately went to bed. Like every night we'd lay our heads on the pillow and go, you know what? We are not what if people. We are why not people. So we did it. And I think that what if mindset just holds so many people back from the things they want to do. And then they get to the end of their life and those are the people that have the regrets and it ultimately came down to the the what-if mindset that was the barrier it's a great point isn't it like if you if

30:19Jim Olsen:you could meet your future self what would your future self tell you yeah it would tell you why not right you only have one life so um you know in my story that's why i'm so excited about the book is all these stories that i mean they're not just all you know medical situations every single person that I feature in the book had those kind of what if crucibles they were facing. But they, again, they shed that what if mindset. They embraced the why not mindset. They came out the other side doing those things that made their life and the lives of the others around them, the people they're helping, more fulfilling by saying, why not, what if?

30:55Jim Olsen:I mean, the blindsided moment you talk about where, you know, you had the eyesight challenge as well that that slowed you down didn't that that it forced you to take a little bit of a break and you talk about this idea of the fourth place which i like as well and of course starbucks is famous for its um positioning as the third place to meet yeah but actually you described the fourth place which is taking yourself out of the situation and um i think you use this phrase you know turning down the volume and turning up creativity because life comes at us fast these days doesn't it and the amount of data and the amount of communication the amount that's going on and the amount of information we're exposed to that causes anxiety because of world events that we know about we wouldn't know about 10 years ago um so how important is it to kind of as you described turn the volume down sometimes yeah well i mean i can't put this concept of you know long before i was at starbucks so and i was actually uh when i turned 30 and i was living here in la and i actually had my own small pr shop down in playa del rey here uh right down the street and um i i had an early midlife crisis at 30 not a midlife it was kind of a 30 something crisis i I climbed Kilimanjaro in Africa.

32:00And that was the first time I was kind of exposed. I took three weeks to do that and go on a foot safari across Kenya. And getting out of L.A. for three weeks and clearing my head, really that kind of exposed this whole idea of kind of think space. And I didn't really know it at the time. So then the book, it kind of manifests itself as what I call this kind of in-between space or the fourth space, if you think of that. And you don't have to go to Africa and do it. You could have a flat in London and just your think space or your fourth place could be your walk around Hyde Park. Or if you're in New York, it could be you're walking your dog through Central Park or your bike, whatever your space is.

32:35Like for me in Chicago, I had to take the train for an hour every single day back when I wasn't traveling from the North Shore to downtown Chicago. And ironically, one of the noisiest places in Chicago, the train, when I put my noise-canceling headphones on, was my quiet, was my think space. It was my time in the morning to at 5 o 'clock, 6 o 'clock in the morning when I got on that train, it was 20 below zero outside to get my mind ready for whatever was coming that day at the airline, which even if there wasn't something that I knew was coming, something would come. And on the way home, it was my chance to decompress and reflect and analyze what had happened that day.

33:12And so your think spaces or fourth spaces or in-between spaces are literally like all around. You've just got to be intentional about finding those. When you go on a plane ride, one of my favorite fourth places is – I'm one of these rare people. Like the longer the flight, the better. And I love just being – a lot of the ideas in the book came through, like just being on a plane with a notepad. I'm old school. I have a notebook and I kind of like – just like you and write down ideas. And I love just being on a plane. I usually take a couple notebooks with me. But a lot of people get on an airplane and they pull out their laptop, work on their spreadsheets or their PowerPoint.

33:45You do have business. So I'm not saying don't get your job done. But if you've got the time, instead of maybe watching a movie, just use that quiet space to just think. I love that.

33:56Jim Olsen:I do exactly the same, by the way. I look forward to those long plane journeys for exactly the reason. I can do a level of deep thinking or reflection or creative that I couldn't do normally. That's so true. So I wanted to touch on another phrase you use. And in this chapter, you're using Zelensky as the example. But a crisis doesn't build character. It reveals it. Yes. Which I thought was very profound. What are some of the lessons from looking at, you know, a leader of a country defend its nation? I mean, this is the sort of thing you hope you never have to live through, isn't it? But he's been thrown into a situation where it's literally existential for him.

34:32Jim Olsen:It's life and death. and against all the odds, somehow he's kind of, you know, keeping the enemy at bay. Yeah, well, I kind of like, what I, you know, love about, you know, Zelensky is, you know, I think a couple of things. One is a leader, both whether you're the leader of a country or a company, it's like, you know, I'm very into legacy, right? And so it's like, what is your legacy going to be? You know, you're either going to be judged for your humanity or your inhumanity, right? And I think that history will show, I don't have a crystal ball, but I think that, you know, if everything plays out the way it should, that Zelensky will be judged for his humanity and the other guy will be judged for his inhumanity.

35:08And the same is kind of true in business, right? You're making decisions every day that are choices. These are intentional choices we're making to either make people's lives, our employees' lives, our customers' lives, our investors' lives better or worse. And as leaders, we have that responsibility. Howard Schultz used to, I remember one of my favorite stories I talk about in the book, I'd been on the job for maybe five weeks and we're in his office overlooking the Puget sound. And we were getting ready to do a phone interview with Bloomberg. And we had a little bit of time to kill. And he's at his Bloomberg terminal, and I'm on the couch.

35:41And Howard turns to me and says, Jim, how are you enjoying the job? And I said, Howard, it's the most exciting job that I... Because I didn't aviate. I didn't think. I communicated before I actually thought about it. And I said, it's the most exciting job I've ever had and just so privileged to be here. And he went back to his Bloomberg. And then about 30 seconds later, he turns back and he goes, Jim, And I don't want you to forget that why we're here is really important. And that's all he said. It was like a mic drop. And I went home that night and we went on with the interview and stuff. And I told my wife, I think I'm going to either get fired or that I failed my first essay exam with one of the most influential leaders in the world.

36:15Because what Howard was saying, I failed the essay exam because I answered with it's the most exciting job I've ever had. And what he was saying, the culture at Starbucks is not about you as the leader. It's about everyone else that kind of orbits around us, our employees, our customers, our investors. And so everything we do, our mission there is to nurture and inspire the human spirit, not nurture and inspire our own spirit. And so I just learned a really important lesson. I didn't get fired, thankfully, and went on for another great five years. But I think it's a really important lesson that we get so caught up in what the value to us is going to be.

36:51And as leaders, I write about this, going back to the quote that you said. And we really need to think about not what is when we have a job, it's not about what the impact is it's going to have on us. But what significance are we going to have on the world as leaders?

37:04Jim Olsen:That's super powerful. I was just intrigued, actually, because you obviously spent time with one of the greatest founders of all time in Howard. I mean, what other lesson or what else do you observe in his leadership style that that people could learn from? Yeah, well, I mean, just one of the most – I just feel so blessed that I had a chance to work with him. And there were so many others that had that chance too. But he just really understood the balance between being growth-oriented and performance-oriented, but also being missions-driven and really holding your values. Even when – it's easy to have mission and values when times are good.

37:44But when times are tough, are you still going to make the tough calls, even when it might set you back some numbers on your quarterly profits? And it might be like most leaders, if the numbers were off, might postpone that leadership conference. Or he had pressure from investors to cut back on the health care that we were off our employees because we were going through a tough stretch. And Howard stood the line. He said, no, that's not who we are. We are not going to be successful and we're not going to get to be and grow to be a$100 billion a year company by cutting back on the health and wellness of our people.

38:19Without our people, we're nothing. We are not a technology company. We are a people company that happens to serve coffee. And so that's, again, what differentiates, I think, really good leaders from great leaders. You have a lot of good leaders who drive the bottom line. But the great leaders like Howard have figured out how to balance that purpose with profitability. He used to say that profitability without purpose is a shallow aspiration. That's a brilliant quote.

38:45Jim Olsen:Yeah, that's absolutely a brilliant quote. And again, we always underestimate in business the importance of people. It is always about the people. And if you can motivate the people, you can get people to work together. You can achieve incredible things. That's so, so powerful. So you've dealt with terrorist incidents. You've dealt with planes dropping out of the sky. you know you've had a lot uh that you've had to contend with in your career and of course personally you've had your own challenges so maybe to wrap up what anyone listening who right now is facing into a big crisis right in this moment in time what would be what be your advice to them i think i'll give them like you know three things i mean one you know i really do believe in the aviate navigate communicate and and there's a fourth section appreciate too um which we didn't really talk about that beyond just the avian navigate communicate, you're not going to get through this alone.

39:37You might, no matter how strong, smart, wealthy you are, you're not going to do it. There's this famous African slogan that if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. And another term I learned on that first trip to Africa where I climbed Kilimanjaro is an African concept called Ubuntu. It's because I'm because of you. And I've kind to try to embrace that. So I think that's one piece. Just remember, don't try to, whatever crisis you're facing at business or in work, don't try to be the hero and do it yourself. The best heroes are the ones that bring others along with them.

40:10Second is this idea that hope is never lost. I have a whole chapter that hopelessness is finite, but hope is infinite. And in the business world, I've had so many leaders in the past who used to say, hope is not a strategy. Well, I like to say, well, yeah, hope's not a strategy. Hope is everything. And you don't have to be religious to believe that, but Disney was able to create Snow White based on pure pixie dust and faith, right? I mean, there's so many examples. Steve Jobs bounced back after being fired from Apple. And so these great leaders have just never lost faith or hope. So just don't lose hope.

40:44And hope really is, when I think about it, I was talking to a friend while I was here over the weekend. And we basically said, what does Tailwind really mean? And well, tailwind is hope. Tailwind is, yes, that's the hope that's going to kind of push you through the storm. And so just kind of marinate in that storm. Use the storm to your advantage. Don't like so many people try to race through a storm as fast as possible. You know, try to just maybe slow down. Pilots throttle back when they hit turbulence or headwinds. So throttle back in your life and just kind of use that storm because, you know, we're not going to be judged by at the end of the day or we're not going to measure our lives by the number of storms we avoid, but rather the magnitude of storms we actually ride through.

41:28Jim Olsen:I love how you've termed that, because you could easily have called the book Headwind, right? Because you face a lot of headwinds, but actually you've pivoted the situation and you've used the situation to create a tailwind for yourself and to project you into a new direction. And by the way, I love the fact you added Appreciate, because it actually made me think as you were talking there, when after i broke my neck and people came to visit me in hospital they were a they were surprised i was conscious because apparently the doctor said i was like the second person ever seen survive an accident like that but everyone said you're surprisingly upbeat i'm like i've just literally broken my neck and survived like i'm really happy yeah and then the same thing happened um we our house burnt down about six years ago and we lost everything everything in the house same thing afterwards people like people quite surprised and i'm like i escaped a house fire the family survived no one died right yeah and then um same thing after i got knocked off my bike a couple of years ago same thing again because you can decide at that moment am i gonna let this defeat me or am i gonna actually or am i gonna appreciate the fact that i've been given another chance yeah you're either gonna you're either gonna get up or give up i can't recall if we discussed the story but like oscar munoz ceo of united told this story in the forward of my book about you know that when he was after came out of his heart transplant they put him in a medically induced coma and a couple hours after he came out of that, he was in the ICU at the hospital in Chicago.

42:49And then the night nurse comes in and says, you know, Oscar, you're doing okay, but it's been a long road. The nurse said, you know, I see a couple kinds of people come through the ICU, but they both asked the same question. The first group asks, why me? Why God did you like inflict me with this tragedy and ruin my life and not, you know, give this to somebody else who's less worthy than me? and the second group come in and say, why me? Why, God, did you give me this second shot at life? Why are you giving me this chance to, you know, be the headlights on the road ahead for other people and light the way for other people to get out of whatever crucible they're facing?

43:26And Oscar told the nurse, you know, I'm committed to being that kind of person. And I told Oscar, I'm committed to being that same kind of person.

43:32Jim Olsen:Amazing, Jim. That is such a powerful place to end and always be that second person, I think, for anyone listening and watching. Thank you so much for sharing your story. congratulations by the way on the launch of tailwind please do get a copy of it i you kindly gave me a manuscript to read and it's it's very heartwarming encouraging inspiring and there are plenty of amazing stories and uh inspirational bits in there so well thanks john for having me on and uh yeah i uh appreciate the uh the opportunity to meet you thanks right you too man thank you so i hope you enjoy that episode of uncensored cmo as much as i enjoyed making it Now, by the way, I've got a new newsletter.

44:10Jim Olsen:So if you'd like to get my thoughts on the one thing that I take out from each episode every week, then do subscribe to the One Thing newsletter. I'd really appreciate it. Also, I have another podcast. Just launched Uncensored Renegades with the fabulous Cori Marchesotto. She is one of the world's best CMOs. She's an absolute rock star. Every week we pick one topic, spend 20 minutes trying to fix it. So check out that. It's in your feed, Uncensored Renegades. And finally, I want to give a huge thank you to my sponsor, System One. They generously provide so much support for this podcast. It would not happen without them.

44:45Jim Olsen:So big thanks and lots of love to System One. I'll see you next time.