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"The perfection imperative"
The problem: Could dependable air travel be maintained while prices were severely cut by abolishing all frills? More important, could the basic structure of the U.S. corporation be changed so that everyone is an owner, everyone a manager?
Sure, says Donald Burr, 43, founder and chairman of People Express, who has done both. Four years ago, when People Express became one of the first new carriers to go into business after the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978, Burr's fledgling venture consisted of little more than one abandoned, rat- infested terminal in Newark and three used Boeing 737s purchased from Lufthansa. Today, People Express is the tenth busiest airline in the U.S., carrying nearly 1 million passengers a month. Some of its fares are one- fourth those of its competitors, but its profits for 1984 will total $23.5 million.
Part of Burr's success has been his policy of cutting amenities: passengers must pay for any checked luggage, even for a cup of coffee (50 cents). As a result, he has kept costs down to a little over 5 cents per seat-mile, vs. an industry average of 8.5 cents. One key way of keeping those costs down is that Burr hires only "managers" (even a flight attendant is a "customer- service manager"), and all 4,000 full-time employees must move around in several different kinds of jobs. Burr occasionally takes his turn as a steward. Not only are the managers nonunion but each of them must buy at least 100 shares of People Express stock, on credit if necessary.
"This is not some old company refurbishing itself, it's a brand-new idea in brand-new clothes," says Burr. "This is not a social experiment. It's a hard-driving capitalist business. We want to maximize profits, and we want to do very well at that. But we can find a better way to do it, a way that is more friendly and more conducive to people getting out of life what the hell they're trying to get out of it. You don't just want to make a buck. You want people to become better people."
If Burr sounds like a combination of a choirmaster's son and a Harvard M.B.A., it is because he is both. His mother, who lives near Hartford, remembers him as "a very emotional boy with great faith." His older brother, an Air Force colonel, says their father's rule was: "There's nothing you cannot do, no task is impossible." Since boyhood, Burr has been interested in aviation; he became a Wall Street analyst of aviation stocks before he was 30, rescued and took over a nosediving airline, Texas International, before he was 36.
Burr believes strongly in what he calls the perfection imperative, the desire to be better. He stopped smoking a year and a half ago; he trains for the marathon every morning; on his upcoming ski trip to Utah, his first extended vacation in five years, he plans to reflect on "life-style improvement to improve my efficiency."
Other corporations fail to follow Burr's lead, he says, because "they think humankind is lazy and bestial and won't do anything unless you beat them to death. We live with a 'boss' structure. But we've proved that if you give people space, room and freedom, you can get trustworthy behavior."
Candy Lightner
"You can make a difference"
The problem: how to cut down on drunk driving, which was killing about 28,000 Americans every year.