From Cancer to Comeback: Jim Olson’s Playbook for Turning Setbacks into Tailwinds

Athena Koutsonikolas: Hi everyone, and welcome to a brand new Aspire to Inspire Podcast episode. My name is Athena Koutsonikolas, and I’m the vice president of marketing in North America at Staffbase. Today’s guest is Jim Olson. Jim is a seasoned communications leader with a front-row seat to some of the most defining moments in corporate crisis history. Jim, most recently, served as head of brand and communications at Avelo Airlines, America’s first new airline in 15 years.

At Avelo, he built the airline’s comms function from the ground up. Jim’s also served as chief communications officer at United Airlines, and led corporate communications at Starbucks and US Airways, where he helped turn the miracle on the Hudson into a moment of employee pride and national inspiration. With decades of experience managing crises from aviation emergencies to global reputational challenges, Jim brings unmatched insight into how internal comms can not only weather the storm but strengthen culture and trust in the process.

Jim, just so excited that you’re joining me today. And to acclimate our listeners, can you give us a quick overview of your career journey from Starbucks, US Airways, to United and Avelo Airlines? I know you have a wonderful three-step motto that you apply to all crisis situations. So I’d love to hear more about that, too.

Jim Olson: Great. Well first, Athena, thank you for having me on. I’m super excited to have the conversation, and whatever lessons I can share with others, everyone wins. PR and comms, intercoms, are a team sport, and no one’s as smart as all of us. So this is a great opportunity to share some stories and lessons. Look, I’ll keep it brief because I know we’re going to go down a lot of different paths in our conversation, but you know I’m a storyteller at heart.

This really stems from my upbringing. I lived in eight different places before I was the age of 18. The hallmark of those was two years in Cartagena, Colombia, when my dad took a humanitarian assignment with Project Hope there. It’s really in Cartagena, in our time in South America, that my compassion for storytelling and curiosity really was unleashed. It was there that I really gained this sense of curiosity, other people, other countries, other cultures, and storytelling became the currency as our family moved around from place to place, that I would actually be able to connect with other people and relate to other people.

If you fast forward to my career, I’ve been very blessed to work with some small organizations, but for the most part, larger global organizations that allowed me to really continue to pursue my passion for travel and storytelling. Obviously, dealing with a few crises along the way, which we’ll talk about, but for the most part, I see myself as a storyteller in terms of helping organizations find their story, tell their story. Then, when their star starts to fall or is under attack, I help them protect their story, and then restore it if it gets damaged.

And so just to collapse all that, the last three decades into about 30 seconds here, started the first 10 years of my career in the automotive industry. My first job out of college with J.D. Power and Associates, which many of you probably see in car commercials and other commercials.

So that was a great place to sharpen my teeth in the automotive industry back in the early ’90s, and then spent about eight years advising Nissan in the ’90s, doing a lot of speech writing, help them on the forefront of their . . . If you think about the internet just coming into existence back in the mid ’90s, I was on the forefront of helping them create their first websites there, and their first intranet for Nissan North America, and doing a variety of digital communications there.

And then after the auto industry, I pivoted to the technology world during the dot-com bubble, and was in the heart of the internet search wars with a company called Overture, which pioneered the whole paid search marketing capability. We were head-to-head battle with Google. Obviously, we know who won that war, but we did give it a good fight, and our company was ultimately acquired by Yahoo, which was a little bit of a testimonial for the success that we had.

And then you fast forward from there, I spent the backside of my career primarily on the corporate communications side of things, on the in-house side of the world. US Airways, I was there, as you noted with, at the time that Sully put the plane in the Hudson River, which I hope we’ll get a chance to talk a little bit more about.

Athena Koutsonikolas: Most definitely.

Jim Olson: Where I was the VP of corporate communications at US Airways. I was the VP of global corporate communications at Starbucks after that, which was an extraordinary time to be there. At the time that I was there, for the half decade I was there, there was the highest growth and expansion period in the company’s history. In fact, in China, we were adding about a store a day when I was there, and added about a dozen to two dozen different countries around the world. So we were up to about 70 countries beyond the US when I was at Starbucks.

And then, ultimately, I couldn’t get the jet fuel out of my veins, and returned to the airline world as the chief communications officer at United Airlines, which was an extraordinary experience. United, as most people know now, is the largest airline in the world, which we’ll talk a little about that in a few minutes. Then, to be honest, actually, the real hallmark or probably the most exciting experience of my life, as exciting as some of those experiences might sound, happened after United when I had the opportunity to serve as an executive in residence at a university in Africa called African Leadership University for a year and a half, living on the island of Mauritius with my family and visiting many countries across the continent where I was teaching and advising on communications. This university had campuses in several countries like Rwanda and Kenya and South Africa. So that was an extraordinary experience.

And I couldn’t get the teaching out of my system, so when I returned from Africa, went to teach at Syracuse University, where I was a full-time professor of public relations there. I thought I’d be doing that probably up until this day. But like so many well-laid plans, they usually go sideways. In this case, it was a good sideways. The former CFO at United Airlines, Andrew Levy, while I was off in Africa and teaching and doing my thing there, he was actually doing something really substantial, like doing the build-out and the fundraise for America’s first new airline in 15 years, called Avelo Airlines.

And so he pulled me out of academia like a jet engine sucking me back into the airline world, to work at my third airline, and which I’ve been doing for almost the last five years. Then recently pivoted to more of an advisory role so that I could finish some special projects that we’ll talk about in a minute. But that’s kind of my life in a nutshell.

Athena Koutsonikolas: Well that is just absolutely outstanding. What a decorated career. I’ve got to say you’ve spanned so many industries and also worked in education. What’s the common thread that has tied your work together across all these different moments?

Jim Olson: Look, I think it’s how I started this whole conversation. It’s great stories. And I’ve been very lucky to work at these companies that, in themselves, some of them are 100-year-old companies like United Airlines, 50-year-old companies like Starbucks. So you’ve got these very iconic brands, but then you also have some of the newest companies in the world, like Avelo Airlines, and when I was at Overture. And so whether you’re old or new, great storytelling never really gets old.

Athena Koutsonikolas: Yeah. So let’s dive in because I want to get some of these stories from you. Over three decades of public relations, you’ve dealt with some of the most high-profile and really high-stakes modern crises, including plane crashes, terrorist bombings, union battles, and a hostile corporate takeover as well. To really dive into the center of crisis comms, I’d love to start off with one of the most high-stake moments in your career, and that was navigating the terrorist attacks that impacted Starbucks. Could you walk us through this situation from your perspective and also share what it taught you about crisis comms?

Jim Olson: You know, like with so many crises, the whole definition of crisis is surprise, right? Yes, you can prepare, and you should absolutely prepare for crises, but on the other hand, there are a lot of situations that you just never think would happen or hope would happen. And certainly, the ISIS terrorist attack on our flagship store in Jakarta, Indonesia, in January of 2016 was one of those true surprises. I was actually on a tour of Asia, our stores in India and China, and some other places with some of our senior leaders, including our CEO, Howard Schultz, at the time.

And it was kind of one of those 9/11 moments when we were sitting in a hotel conference room in India, and Howard was getting ready to go on stage to do a talk with our business partner there, Tata. About 5 minutes before we went on stage, our phones just lit up, and we all saw the same picture crossing our screens of one of our stores, literally with smoke brimming out the front of the store, shattered, and the headline, “Starbucks under attack from ISIS.”

And we all just looked at each other stunned, and I told Howard, I said, “You need to go on stage, go do your talk, and we’ll sort this out when you get back, but you definitely need to acknowledge it when you’re out there.” 

We dug in a little bit more, and it was a ISIS terrorist attack. Ultimately, it was a suicide bombing at our store. But again, like so many things in the media, the first narratives to come out are actually incorrect. It was not so much that Starbucks was under attack, but rather it was our store, given the profile we had in Jakarta, was essentially a booby trap to try and get after their real target, which was the military in Indonesia.

And so they used our store just as, again, a trap to lure first responders and other military and police there that they then had secondary, I guess, attackers or assassins that were standing ready to go after and basically ambush the military. But it was a horrific attack. Suicide bomber comes in. Thankfully, we had a very, very situationally aware young man, I think probably about 16 or 17, who was our security guard there.

And he had the situational awareness because this individual came in, you know in Jakarta, in January, it’s very hot and steamy and muggy. And he came in, in a parka. And so it just set off all kinds of

Athena Koutsonikolas: Alarm bells, yeah.

Jim Olson: Alarms for him. And he actually yelled at all the customers, “Everyone out of the store.” That saved literally countless lives by getting everyone out of the store. And then our team of Starbucks employees, which we call partners, they actually hid. They locked themselves back in the break room as the explosion went off. And miraculously, all five of those baristas and store managers survived. I think a couple ended up in the hospital, but survived that attack. The suicide bomber did not.

The sad thing was, as our customers were running out of the store, as I was mentioning, the additional ISIS attackers were waiting. And so it’s really unclear if any of them were ultimately wounded or killed or attacked in the exiting of the store, because there was a whole different theater of violence going on outside of the store. But if you fast forward to the real story behind the story of this crisis and the lemons that come out of lemonade, or the real power of humanity comes out of such tragedy, can be found, ultimately, in the culture and purpose, and sense of mission that existed at Starbucks.

Literally, that evening, I parachuted into Jakarta to essentially be the boots on the ground to assess what was going on and work with the police and figure out what was going on and whether it’d be safe for our CEO Howard Schultz to come in as well to meet with our employees and customers and others. We ultimately . . .

Athena Koutsonikolas: And you had come in from India, correct?

Jim Olson: Yes, we were all in India, yes. I flew in early to just work with our existing Starbucks managers and team on the ground there to triage the situation. One of the things that came out of those discussions, as I mentioned earlier, which was really critical, and this is a key lesson, is that usually 99% of what’s reported in the media in the first round of coverage out of a crisis is incorrect. And so those initial headlines that were crossing the screen, that Starbucks was under attack from ISIS, were actually 100% wrong.

Starbucks was not the target of this attack, which could have actually caused irrevocable damage to the brand, right? If you think about Starbucks being in 70 countries around the world, and all of a sudden, the threat or the veil of fear that you’d go into a Starbucks and you’re potentially a target for ISIS, that could have been devastating for the brand. So we worked very closely with the head of the military there. I was in meetings with those individuals, and we were able to persuade them to actually go out and do a press conference that actually shifted that narrative from Starbucks being under attack, to them essentially, very humbly indicating that actually it was their own military that was actually the target of the attacks, which was critical in this management of this crisis. But the real heart of the story here is not what happened on the outside and with the media and the external side. Like so many crises, the real power of renewal and restoration, and crisis happens on the inside. And so about 48 hours after the crisis, or after the attack, Howard and some of the other leaders flew into Jakarta under the cloak of darkness in the middle of the night.

And we closed down all our stores for two days across the country, flew in all, there were probably about 2,000 baristas and store managers from across the country, they flew into Jakarta, rented out a huge hotel conference room in Jakarta, and Howard delivered probably one of the most heartfelt, deeply personal, inspiring speeches. I might not even call it speech, speech is not appropriate. It wasn’t even a speech.

It was just truly a conversation with these 2,000 baristas and partners, just reinforcing that Starbucks was standing 100% behind them, and that we would get through this and that the core of our resilience was our mission, which was to inspire and nurture the human spirit, and that an attack like this was not going to get in the way of that mission. But equally inspiring to that experience was a sidebar meeting that Howard had right before he went on stage with the five partners or employees of Starbucks who were at the store at the time of the attack.

Those that had been in the hospital had been released by that point. And it was about an hour-long discussion. So it was with Howard, our president of Asia, myself, Vivek Varma, who was our head of global public affairs at the time. And we basically were there just to listen and learn from these individuals and express our unbending support and pride and happiness, first of all, and joy that they survived and second most, our pride and gratitude for the courage that they showed during really unimaginable circumstances.

And I still remember, as the meeting drew to a close, Howard standing up and asking the five employees, “Is there anything that I or Starbucks can do at this point? What can we do to support you?” And the five employees were sitting in the front row in this very small little room, and the store manager stood up, and he probably was no older than 23 or 24. And he said, “Howard,” he goes, “we don’t want anything from you or the company. But what we do want is for you to rebuild this store so that we can make it the best Starbucks in the world.”

And here are these individuals who’ve just been through this turmoil. They could have asked for anything. They could have asked for money, they could have asked for a long vacation or retirement or time off. And what did they ask for? They asked for Howard to rebuild the store bigger and better so that they could make it the best Starbucks in the world. And I think that there’s no greater testimony to the power of the culture and the values of the Starbucks organization than what you saw right there. 

Athena Koutsonikolas: That’s so incredible. And you talked a bit about that meeting that you and Howard and other colleagues held with those five employees that were in the store. But what about the 2,000 employees where you held that meeting? How do you keep a real-time pulse on employee sentiments and how they’re feeling, what they’re feeling, and what they’re experiencing beyond the directly impacted employees?

Jim Olson: Well, that’s why we hosted that huge session. Like I said, I correct myself, it wasn’t even a speech that Howard gave, it was more of a big conversation. It was a big tent conversation with all these folks. And it was not just Howard coming in and delivering a speech and then going back to some green room. He spent literally hours after that just literally walking the entire, I guess, ballroom, hugging, speaking one-on-one with a huge number of those individuals, those partners, or those employees.

And so I think that, right there, just shows the kind of servant leader that Howard is and kind of just implies there’s so many other leaders like Howard out there that would take the time. I’m not saying he’s the only one that would have done that. There are a lot of other leaders out there that I know would have done exactly the same thing, but that’s how you keep a pulse.

You don’t do it through surveys. Yes, surveys are important and all that, but in my mind, the best way to keep your finger on the pulse of how employees or an organization is feeling is through just good old-fashioned conversations and just talking to people, putting the screens down, putting the phones down and just actually talking to people.

Athena Koutsonikolas: Yes, I think that goes a long way to ensure that people feel seen and heard, and love that example of servant leadership, and the vulnerability there as well, so crucial during moments of crisis.

Jim Olson: I think that’s the other thing I’ll add is that, Maya Angelou who suggested this, but it’s not what you say, but it’s how you make people feel that really ultimately matters. And I think that story that I shared, to be honest, aside from the words that that store manager shared with Howard, I really can’t remember a single word that Howard delivered in that conversation to those 2,000 employees. I do know, and I can still feel it to this day, how he made them feel.

Athena Koutsonikolas: Wow, so powerful. And on the note, let’s stay in the vein of crisis comms. I want to look at an example of how to handle things both right and wrong. So after leading comms at three different airlines, I know you are incredibly aware of the impact of crisis comms in this sector. And sadly, it’s a reality that commercial air crashes are still occurring. Taking from your very storied career in airline communications, could you walk us through some of the communication misfires that you’ve witnessed across the industry?

Jim Olson: Well, let me first say this. Everyone who’s watching the news, there have sadly been some accidents that have made the news in a pretty consolidated string of accidents that maybe magnifies the fear that maybe some people have about flying, that probably is a little misplaced. I think it should be noted, and I’ll deliver this public service announcement on behalf of the industry, because it’s one that I’m very passionate and care about. Let there be no mistake, air travel, whether it’s in the US or other parts of the world, is bar none the safest way to travel, period, full stop.

That accident that happened in DC, the American Airlines flight, that was the first fatal crash in the US, or accident in the US, since 2009. The first. So literally, it doesn’t mean there hadn’t been some other incidents and stuff that caused planes to return to the airport, but in terms of a fatal airline accident in the US, the last time there was a fatal US air accident was in 2009. So you’re looking, basically, at least, what, 15 years or so since that period.

You don’t even have to walk to your local shopping mall to know that there was probably even a fatal accident of somebody sadly driving from their house to the shopping mall or to the grocery store in your own neighborhood on any given day. So I just shared that as a little bit of a backdrop because I think that is important, because you see the media does a pretty good job of dramatizing these situations, and certainly it’s important. Dramatized probably isn’t the right word, but of reporting on these incidents.

But it is important, whether in the US or around the world, air travel is still, bar none, absolutely the safest way. You’re safer getting on a plane going from Houston to New York than you are actually just walking from your home a mile down the street to Starbucks to get your coffee in the morning. So that said, it also qualifies what I’m about to say this way too. I’ve had a window seat and been involved with several accidents, crises, whether airlines or others. And I will say this, nothing frustrates me more than Monday morning quarterbacks.

I’ve had my fair share of stones thrown at me, some of them fair, some of them not, in terms of how I’ve, and my teams have maybe handled different crises. I do find it interesting that there are a lot of people out there that are so happy and quick to jump to critique others that are trying to manage through a crisis when they themselves, and I’ve looked up some of these people, have never actually even dealt with a crisis before in their own lives or professional lives.

So I’ve always tried to embrace, for myself, this idea that I’m not going to be, even though I might have the license to do it, but I’ve lived through these crises. I’ve always tried to calibrate myself not to be one of those Monday morning quarterbacks because you never really know what’s going on the inside of these organizations. That said, I’ll speak generally about some of the recent, I guess, accidents that have happened.

If I take a step back, the most important thing, whether it be an airline accident or others, is it’s about speed, it’s about accuracy, and it’s about empathy and authenticity. And obviously, there’s a lot of other stuff in between that. And when you start getting to airlines, there’s a lot of regulatory procedural stuff and all that. But if you zoom out from a crisis management standpoint, it ultimately comes down to speed, accuracy, authenticity, and empathy, both from an internal standpoint and from a media standpoint and from your messaging.

I will say this, the folks at American Airlines, because I’d like to focus on the positive, I do think if you’re looking for a case study in how to manage a crisis, whether you’re in the airline world or not, I thought that Robert Isom, the CEO of American, and the comms team who I know really well at American did a . . . if I was putting Professor Olson’s hat back on and grading it as a professor, I absolutely would have given them an A on their response.

Given these things happen at the most inconvenient times. It was a evening when it happened, you know these things never happen at the most convenient time, like at 10 o’clock on a Monday morning. So I watch these things very critically, and I give them that A with my highest level of intellectual honesty and critiquing of things. So if you are looking for a really good case study, bookend to bookend in terms of everything from internal to customer care, family care, messaging, CEO response, I do think, at least from my observation, it was a best practice to look at.

That said, I do think there have been some other examples. I won’t name the airlines by name, that have been a little less than A quality responses. And I think each one’s individual, have their own reasons for that, but in some cases, it was speed, in other cases, it was authenticity, in some cases, it was empathy. So each of these situations is different, but I think if you’re really looking for, again, a holistic case study response, just take a look at American.

Athena Koutsonikolas: Yeah. And I want to double-click on what you noted about the bad example on authenticity. How do you see a lack of authenticity manifest? Is it lack of substance? Is it the no-update update? What does that look like?

Jim Olson: Oh, I think it’s a couple of ways. I think, one, it’s how do you show up? So do you have the resources on the ground to support those that have been impacted by this? Are you actually engaging with your own employees? If you think about employees, if it’s an airline accident, pilots, the flight attendants, the crews, these are folks that actually, many people are friends with or colleagues with, they just checked them into the flight a few hours earlier. So there’s a lot of connection between employees and the crew members, and with the customers as well.

If you think about, if you’re the gate agent, boarding 250 people on a flight, and those souls have moved on because of the accident, that’s a pretty traumatic experience. And so you’ve got to be ready as a company to support. Whether those employees of that airline are directly or indirectly involved, you’ve got to be ready to support them. So I think, just back to your question, I think the authenticity just really comes down to it’s that side of it, that actual very human interaction, but it’s also the words you use.

One of the things I really implore upon companies, whether the airline industry or others, whether it be a food retailer or whatever the case might be, manufacturer, is really take the time ahead of time to really think through what your narrative is going to be in a moment of crisis. Doesn’t mean all the details are going to change, right? You’re going to have all the details the situation might be, you can’t anticipate every kind of crisis that might happen. We never anticipated what would have happened in Jakarta, but we certainly did, at Starbucks, have a existing narrative in place for how we would respond to different kinds of situations.

And the best of those narratives, if you’re planning ahead of time, are rooted in your mission, your purpose, and your values. But if you’re scrambling in the heat of the moment of a crisis to put together the messaging, whether it’s the initial press conference for a CEO or leader, or the tweets you’re putting out, or the quotes in the press release, if you’re scrambling in the moment, there’s probably a good chance you’re going to not be speaking with that same level of sense of purpose and mission because you’re just so distracted with everything else going on.

Athena Koutsonikolas: I want to pull the thread there a bit more because you’re speaking to that level of preparedness and having a framework in place. Obviously, to your point, the details are going to change in the moment because you can’t possibly anticipate what the crisis will be. But have there been moments in crisis where you’ve applied that framework, you’ve applied that playbook, but there have been learnings in the thick of that crisis that have prompted you to make alterations to that bedrock to ensure that you’re better equipped in future crises?

Jim Olson: Yeah, well I think it’s probably a good moment to introduce this, I guess, can’t call it a framework, but this ideology, I guess, that I have, for better or worse, informally applied to how I approach crisis comms, which is the idea of aviate, navigate, communicate. And that idea is certainly not my original idea, is maybe a little original to how we apply it to crises, but that concept of aviate, navigate, communicate is very, very well known among pilots.

If you have friends who are either just civilian pilots or if you know people in the military or commercial pilots, that same concept of aviate, navigate, communicate, it literally is the first thing that every pilot learns when they go to flight training school. And it’s the concept they use if there’s an in-flight emergency, whether it’s an engine fire, the hydraulics go out, if there’s some other kind of the radio system or the electronics blow a circuit, whatever the mid-flight emergency might be, this idea of aviate, navigate, communicate is something every single pilot applies to a situation.

Now, some apply it better than others. There’s plenty of examples out there of accidents where the crews did not apply it, and things went horribly wrong. And then there’s some phenomenal examples where crews have applied it in textbook accuracy, like Flight 1549 and the Miracle of the Hudson and Sully Sullenberger. I mean that is, again, a casebook model in terms of following the aviate, navigate, communicate protocol.

Just to dig deeper a little bit on that whole concept, aviate, what that basically means is the idea is you keep flying the plane. Because the navigate and the communicate parts are irrelevant. If the plane isn’t flying and something happens, it doesn’t really matter if you figure out where you’re going to land the plane. Yeah. So the number one thing pilots learn is just fly the plane, right? Just keep the plane . . . don’t get distracted with all the smoke and all the other stuff. Obviously, you can’t ignore that stuff, but your number one job is to fly the plane and keep the plane in the air as long as possible. Because that buys you time to figure out where you’re going to navigate. And then you can figure out the communications side of things.

That same kind of framework applies to how we manage in the world of communications, and whether you’re a nonprofit or a corporation, how we can apply that same concept to crisis communications in our world. So if you think about, if you have an active shooter or something like that, or what we had at Starbucks, our first goal is the safety of our people. If you’re not an airline, aviate means basically just manage the situation.

Your goal is to contain and ensure that whatever the situation is, that you’re just focused, not on the communications side of things, not worrying about the first tweet you’re going to put out or X post or Instagram post, but you’re focused on literally making sure your people are safe and you’re managing and containing whatever that situation is that you might call. Whether it’s a food recall, whether it’s an active shooter, whether it’s a terrorist attack, whether it’s some other accident, just fly your plane, whatever that plane might be.

Again, without getting into specific details, whether it be in my career or others, I think folks get tripped up because we are under so much pressure now with the world of social media and the transparent fishbowl that we live in. There is actually a lot, a lot of pressure to communicate. And I’m not discounting the importance of communications, but that’s where things go sideways.

If you look at that Starbucks example, right? The initial reports were that Starbucks was under attack. The reality is Starbucks actually wasn’t under attack. It was a trap to go after a different target. In our very fast-paced world where we want to try to just get through everything as fast as possible, I think there is value, and some might disagree with me here, in just aviating a little bit on our comms side of things and really understanding what the reality is, getting the facts. And it doesn’t mean you can’t acknowledge there’s a situation. You can certainly acknowledge there’s a crash or there’s an attack going on, but you don’t have to really go much deeper than that in trying to explain what’s happening until you really have all the facts.

And all those facts are usually wrong. The initial facts are usually incorrect. And so I’d really encourage people just to, as hard as it is, to just slow down a little bit during a crisis. Doesn’t mean you put your head in the sand and not acknowledge what’s going on through a social post or otherwise, but it can actually be reputationally harmful if you actually start communicating before you aviate. And what I mean by that is if you do actually put out statements or messages, whether it be internal or external, that is based on the initial incorrect information, it’s literally impossible to put that toothpaste back in the tube.

And as I reflect on things, I would much rather be criticized, if industry pundits out there and the armchair quarterbacks out there are going to criticize Jim Olson for how he responded to a crisis, I’d much rather be criticized for being a little bit slow but being accurate, versus jumping the gun and using the wrong language and not being able to put that back in. So I don’t know if that really answered your question, but . . .

Athena Koutsonikolas: No, it was very helpful. And I do want to keep things focused on all things aviation and comms, because you mentioned something earlier that I’m very keen to unpack. I think it’s time for us to dig into the Pilot Sully story. So could you take us inside that moment where you were managing comms directly following the miracle on the Hudson?

Jim Olson: Yes, well, another one of my bumper sticker philosophies is that crises aren’t stressful, not being prepared is stressful. And so when I joined US Airways in the spring of 2008, even though I was a passionate traveler and I could tell you every kind of airplane out there just by looking at its tail pretty much, this was my first airline comms job. But I was keen enough to know that the universe was not going to give me a hall pass just because I was new and say, “We’re going to wait five years to give Jim his first plane crash,” even though they didn’t happen that frequently. But I was very concerned making sure that our team was ready for whatever might happen.

So one of the first things I did when I got to US Airways in 2008 was do a pretty deep dive on our crisis readiness and our crisis plan. I had a fantastic team there. Elise Eberwein, who was our head of people and public affairs, who was my boss, who I continue to be great friends with and is a huge mentor. She and I partnered to make sure we really just did a fresh view of our crisis plan. And we did a full tabletop exercise in December of 2008, which again, having no idea that those Canada geese would decide to fly into a plane a couple of weeks later, was probably the smartest thing we ever did because we went into 2009 feeling pretty confident about our ability to collaborate and respond to a crisis if it were to happen.

Now there were certainly some things that came out of that tabletop, some things we needed to make some investments in and fix if we’d wanted to really deliver A+ response, but those were some longer-term initiatives. January 15th, 2009 happened. Most people don’t probably remember what they were doing on the date. I remember certainly with crystal clarity what I was doing on that day when I was in Phoenix, Arizona at our headquarters.

And I’ll spare you guys all the details, but thankfully we had that crisis plan ready. The call came in. I was sitting in my office and my assistant came and said, “Jim, this reporter wants a comment on one of our planes floating down the Hudson.” And we were off to the races at that point. Like a well-oiled, military operation, we just went down our checklist, our battle plan, basically, in terms of how to execute against this. And we followed our plan to a T, everyone knew what their battle stations were. And for the most part, it was probably one of the more complex crises ever to happen. If you think about most accidents, they happen at a specific location. In this case, it was a moving accident site. It was floating down the Hudson.

And so when customers were evacuated off the plane by the ferries, unlike most accidents where survivors are triaged in a single location or sent to a single hospital or put under a single tent, in this case, they got off . . . you know, everyone survived. There were a couple injuries, but everyone survived. With the exception of a few people who went to the hospital, of the 150 passengers, probably 145 of them just disappeared into the worldworks of Manhattan. Some got in cabs and went back to the airport, some went to friends’ places in New York, some went to check into hotels, I know someone went and sat at a bar for the next 12 hours.

Athena Koutsonikolas: Wow.

Jim Olson: But we had no way of . . . If you think about it, everyone left their phones and this was back in the day of 2009, right? People weren’t quite as connected back then. From an accident standpoint and a comms standpoint, it’s probably one of the more complex crises to manage because all the 150 passengers were so dispersed. They just basically disappeared off our radar screen. So we didn’t really know for about 24, 48 hours whether all of them had survived or not, because we just didn’t have any accounting for them. You know, BusinessWeek ultimately came out and called it a case study in crisis management, which was a huge testimonial for us.

The customers were ultimately, I think, very satisfied with how we ultimately treated them. We restored literally . . . This is an interesting angle. Even though we weren’t required to do this by any law or regulation, we went back and . . . if you think about the plane sank to the bottom of the Hudson River. We literally went and extracted, once the investigation was over, every single suitcase, every single item that was left on that plane and shipped it to a company in Texas that literally went through, it took about six months to do this, went through and really restored every single item.

There were probably well over 100,000 unique items from pens to computers to socks, rings and necklaces. But we went through every single item, all 100,000 items and literally restored them. And in fact, some of the jewelry and watches and stuff we got back to customers, they said it actually looked better and worked better than before the accident.

Athena Koutsonikolas: No way. That’s incredible. And if I remember correctly, there was also a flight attendant who made headlines for what she said. How do you elevate voices like hers during a crisis?

Jim Olson: Yeah, well, I think this is a large part of what we’re talking about, is the employee comms side of things here, is that, one, in the moment of the crisis, a big part of our plan, a lot of people think of crisis comms as just the external side. What kind of statements are you going to put out? What kind of tweets are you going to put out?

I would say at least 50% to 60% of our US Airways crisis plan that we had going into the miracle on the Hudson was employee focused, whether it be video messages from our CEO and other leaders, whether it be frequent updates, whether it be being very transparent on our intranet and having all the documentation about things about the accident on our intranet, I would say at least 50% of our crisis response or readiness plan, whether it be for flight 1549 or another accident, was our strategic readiness comms crisis plan, 50% was employee focused.

So the first thing to emphasize is that while all this was going on, everyone probably watching this could see the above the waterline media response and all the interviews with customers and Sully and everything happening on The Today Show and CBS and all these things and all the social media we were putting out. Below the waterline, there was a whole separate machine or apparatus going on to engage and communicate with our employees at US Airways, whether it be crew members, whether it be management, people working in the administrative side of things, whether it be folks working at airports. We had about 30,000 employees at US Airways at the time. So that employee engagement was certainly very important.

But one of the things that I think was really important for us to do, and we didn’t do this immediately, but we did it probably about three months after the accident. There’s no mistake that Captain Sullenberger and Jeff Skiles, who was the first officer on the flight, did a truly remarkable, if not miraculous job landing that plane and making the decision to land the plane on the Hudson River and do it just so, I want to say, seamlessly, but without virtually any injuries or fatalities. It’s just truly, again, a case study in airmanship that everyone knows about.

And it was rightfully honored by cover stories on Time Magazine, there was no shortage. It was probably the biggest media cycle I’ve ever been part of in my life on a global basis. What Elise and I at US Airways felt, we felt, you know what? Sully and Jeff Skiles are certainly deserving of all this recognition. But the second piece of the puzzle, the reason everyone survived, was because of the heroic work that the flight attendants did. So we had three flight attendants on that Airbus aircraft that day. And the reason that you saw all the customers out on the wings and in the rafts out there so quickly was because of their heroic work.

If you think about it, the plane was just floating on the Hudson, there was a huge hole on the bottom of the plane in the back, with the cold, I mean it was January, icy water rushing in. If you think about being on a plane, the water was up to the tops of the seats in the back half of the plane. That’s why you never saw anyone going out the back of the plane, it was always on the wings because they had to get everyone out front. So we felt like, you know what, sometimes the temptation always is, when it comes to storytelling, to focus on the heroes. But Elise and I thought, “You know what, let’s pitch a story that’s about the unsung heroes. Let’s give some recognition to the folks that actually played an equally important part in that whole heroic experience.”

And so we pitched a story to the New York Times, which essentially ran with that central headline. It was the unsung heroes of flight 1549. There might’ve been a brief mention of Sully in the article, but our CEO, Doug Parker, gave a great interview supporting the flight attendants. There was this just absolutely elegant and honoring picture of the three flight attendants, I think it was either on Madison Avenue or Fifth Avenue in their uniforms, looking as professional and heroic as they deserved.

So I’m very proud of that story because it was not only a great opportunity to honor those three extraordinary flight attendants and women, but more importantly, I think it was a huge morale boost and it really gave a lot of lift and excitement and pride to the other 30,000 employees at US Airways because they were so proud to see our flight attendants being recognized in addition to the very noteworthy and deserving coverage that Sully and Jeff Skiles were getting.

Athena Koutsonikolas: Just an incredible case study in taking what would have been a moment of panic into a moment of pride and joy and just a heroic endeavor. Thank you so much for sharing some of the behind-the-scenes aspects to that story that we weren’t privy to, just reading the news headlines and reading the story, super interesting.

I do want to switch gears now. Jim, you’ve been very open about your personal health crisis in the past year and a half, which influences how you view the broader concept of crisis management. And I know you’re in the process of writing a book about crisis management, both business and personal and it’s going to be released later this year. And there is this focus on turning your setback story into your comeback legacy. And as we were chatting about earlier before we started the podcast, you used this analogy that I love and it’s a personal philosophy of mine, which is to make lemonade out of lemons.

And before we hear from you on this, I just want to say that I’ve read the foreword from Oscar Munoz, the former chairman and CEO of United Airlines. And there’s also praise from a collection of CEOs like Michelle Gass from Levi’s and Starbucks retired CEO, Howard Schultz. But I just want to share Oscar Munoz’s reflections on this book with our listeners, because it really struck a chord with me. I’m going to read it now.

“I consider Jim’s book a gift. Not a memoir, but a flight plan for how anyone can meet the master, the ocean of storms that we all must navigate in our lives. When you pick this book up, you will be unable to put it down and equally unable to put it out of your mind long after you’re finished. Perhaps this book is so powerful, not in spite of Jim’s lack of sight, but because of it. His medical hurdles have only sharpened his vision. These messages strike the reader like thunderbolts to the mind and heart, one after another.” Jim, there’s so much there. Can you tell us more about the inspiration behind your book?

Jim Olson: Yes, well, first, the word from Oscar, like I said, it’s a foreword to people reading the book, but to me it’s a lifeline. When you’re a cancer survivor like myself and the collateral damage that has caused my legal blindness, you have many bright days, but you have many dark days. And so I write in the book about how there’s blue sky behind every storm. You never, when you fly, no matter how cloudy it is as you’re taking off and going through the clouds, I’ve never been on a flight in 30 years of flight where you ultimately didn’t break through the clouds and see blue skies or at least stars in the night.

So in many ways, Oscar, who I worked with at United, is considered a good friend, and he’s actually a great example of a comeback story in himself. For those that know, he had a life-threatening heart attack and ultimately a heart transplant about three weeks into his job at United, and it would have been easy for him to have just tossed in the towel after surviving all that, but he kept fighting and turned the culture and united the culture at United in a way that had never been done before. So anyway, that foreword in many ways is so much more than a foreword. It’s so much more than a flight plan. For me, it’s a lifeline that I’ll continue to refer to time and time again. Not really sure where you’d like me to start on this. There’s a lot to unpack here, but . . .

Athena Koutsonikolas: There’s so much to unpack. I guess the impetus for putting pen to paper on this book.

Jim Olson: The impetus for this was really, if you think back to my initial stage 4 cancer diagnosis in January of 2024, everything was going great for the first six months, and actually continued to be pretty good after that too. I was on a very fast track to remission despite a inch and a half tumor on my brain and a 2 1/2 inch tumor on my lung. But the treatments my doctor was giving me, immunotherapy and radiation were working exceptionally well. But then about almost exactly a year ago, July of 2024, I woke up one day with this horrific vision loss. It literally went from clarity to this fog of . . . I don’t know how I can describe it, it’s just this horrible fog.

For anyone who’s gone to the eye doctor and had dilation drops put in their eyes, it’s probably the best way I can describe it. It’s almost as though you had a double dose of dilation drops put in your eyes and the drops never wore off. So that’s the world that I see right now, is just through that lens of constant dilation. So it was pretty scary. In July, when this initially happened, it was scarier than almost the cancer diagnosis. I mean I literally felt like my world was going into a perilous nosedive. I felt like probably how Sully felt when Canada geese shot both his engines and he had no thrust anymore, because I couldn’t see screens, I couldn’t read stuff. But I muscled through.

I still did a couple of press conferences in July. I just tried to muscle through. And then, finally, in August, I said, “You know what, I adopted the aviate, navigate, communicate philosophy.” And so I figured, “I’ve got to aviate here. I’ve got to put my pilot hat on and I can’t let my world continue to spiral to the ground. And I’ve got to lift back up.” And so my way of lifting back up was taking a few months off of work so that I could actually calibrate, figure out what was happening with my vision and also just stabilize the situation, which was the best thing I ever did.

Because during that period, when you’re on short-term disability, you aren’t working. You can’t work. And it’s probably the first time in my entire career, aside from a few vacations along the way where literally I was waking up every morning, go on my walks and had my Starbucks, and I had nothing to do when I got home. And so I started journaling, and the journaling, thanks to the encouragement of my wife and daughter, turned into inspiration to actually start writing a book, because very rarely do you have that much time to actually just do something. The initial purpose of writing the book was not actually to even write a book. The initial purpose was actually to use this almost occupational therapy to figure out how to zoom in, use some of the different accessibility tools that I have to use now, have Siri read back stuff to me.

So I was interviewing people for the book on Teams and Zoom and all these things. All these things that in July I felt were impossible, I now had a very safe environment to actually practice and refine these skills. So my mission was really, yes, writing the book was important, but more importantly, I wanted to go back to work. That was my goal, was to go back to Avelo in a couple months and be back doing everything that I was doing before without missing a beat. And so in many ways, the book served as that safe practice ground to relearn how to ride a bike, walk and breathe again, but in a visual way. And in the process, I had nothing else to do during those days. I’d spend my days after I get back from my walks, 8:00 in the morning, 7:00 in the morning, I’d be basically writing from seven to eight o’clock at night, I’d just punch this thing out.

Athena Koutsonikolas: Wow. That is super impressive and very inspiring as well, given your diagnosis, you’ve definitely turned . . . you made lemonade out of lemons for sure. A lot of our listeners, they’re in internal comms, corporate affairs, external comms type functions. What’s the one takeaway from your book that you would hope that those folks get?

Jim Olson: The framework for the book actually follows the Aviate, Navigate, Communicate framework. So those are the key sections, but there’s a fourth section, which actually is not one of the lessons that pilots are actually taught, but they probably should be taught it, which is appreciate. So the four sections of the book are Aviate, Navigate, Communicate, and Appreciate. Because anyone who’s gone through any kind of personal or organizational or leadership crisis knows that you do not get through these things by yourself.

And so I think from an internal comms standpoint, I think the chapter that I’m actually . . . it’s a great read. I hope everyone reads it. But my hope is that, I think, probably my favorite chapter to write was the Appreciate chapter, because that was actually an opportunity to really showcase the power of gratitude. I talk about this term, from living in Africa, called Ubuntu. That’s  actually one of the chapters in that section. Ubuntu is this concept that I am because of you.

I think if there’s one takeaway or one chapter that folks read, and you have to really abbreviate your reading of it, would be that Appreciate section and that chapter Ubuntu, because it really does, I think, give testimony to the importance of recognizing all the people. If you’re in an organizational situation, all the employees, all the different stakeholders that are so important in making your organization or your team successful.

Athena Koutsonikolas: I love that concept of appreciation. We certainly appreciate your time today. And with that, I would like to ask you one final question before we wrap things up. And that’s about your time at Avelo. Very different beast. You came in and you had to build the comms function from the ground up. What were your priorities from day one?

Jim Olson: Well, we were just talking about gratitude, but first and foremost, I entered Avelo in early 2021 with immense gratitude to Andrew Levy, who is the founder and CEO of Avelo Airlines for giving me the chance to actually help write the first chapter of America’s newest airline, because airlines only come along once every 15 years. They’re not like opening restaurants or technology companies. But as I moved this summer into a more of an advisory role, I exit my formal time with Avelo with even a greater intensity of gratitude for having basically a window seat to basically the launch of, again, America’s first new airline in 15 years and going from three airplanes in April of 2021 to now 22 airplanes and flying to 60 destinations across the country, including some international destinations in the Caribbean.

We’ve got 1,200 amazing, we call all of our employees crew members, whether you’re flying the plane or not, we believe very much in everyone being on an equal playing field. And it’s just been an extraordinary ride. Our CEO, Andrew Levy, likes to say that airlines are a team sport. And I would argue that a startup airline is the ultimate team sport because you do not have the benefit of all the money in the bank that the big guys have. So when you’re facing all the issues that airlines face, whether it be economic headwinds, softness in consumer confidence, things like COVID, all the hurricanes that wipe out a route to some of the more popular destinations.

If you’re at one of the larger airlines, you have a pretty nice war chest or treasure chest of money to help you weather those storms. When you’re a startup, you’ve got to get much more creative and just roll up your sleeves and power through and, again, you don’t have to take my word for it, you can google it. Most startup airlines barely make it a year to two years and they collapse. And so the fact that here we are talking as Avelo turns the corner on its fifth year of flying, we’ve flown literally millions of customers. We have 1200 people where we have bases all across the country. All of us who’ve either worked at the airline in the past or currently work at the airline, there’s a huge amount of pride in terms of what we built. And I continue to believe as much in Andrew and the airline as I did back in April of 2021 when we did that first flight from Burbank to Napa Valley.

Athena Koutsonikolas: Wow. Well Jim, I’ve got to say, I have learned so much from our conversation today. Thank you for humbling us with all your wisdom and your experience. I really also enjoyed all the aviation type analogies. They’re great. Good to see those pull through as well. I know that our listeners will certainly benefit from all your insights as well. So thank you again. And I hope that everyone enjoyed this episode of Aspire to Inspire and be sure to join us again and also keep an eye out for Jim’s book, which is coming out later this year, I believe. Is that right, Jim?

Jim Olson: Yeah. Hopefully this fall. And it’s called “Tailwind: A Compass For Turning Your Setback Story Into Your Comeback Legacy.” So stay tuned for more.

Athena Koutsonikolas: Wonderful. Thank you so much.

Jim Olson: Thank you, Athena. And keep flying high.