United’s CEO Naps At Work, Limits Meetings To 4 Hours A Day And Says His Job Is To “Think Hard”

When Scott Kirby arrived at United Airlines, he told his assistant he was going to take a nap. He’d be back in 15 or 20 minutes. Then he laid down on the office floor. People at American already knew he did this. United’s employees were surprised. A couch appeared in his office after the first week. The man running United sleeps eight and a half hours a night, takes a short nap most days, reads about three hours daily and tries to limit meetings to four hours. His explanation: “The further you go in your career, certainly by the time you’re the CEO, your job is not to work hard. It’s to think hard.” In an interview with The CEO Signal, Kirby also explains hiring an artificial intelligence tutor, learning to communicate with employees from Oscar Munoz, and why he now considers spreadsheet conclusions “toxic.” That last one is an incredible statement of Scott Kirby’s journey. For much of his career, he was known as the spreadsheet guy. I’ve written about underestimating how much he could change. United has made incredible progress since he joined the airline, but his retrospective account of having understood what’s important for success in the airline industry all along is harder to square with the decisions he used to make as President of US Airways and American. He Protects Time To Read Things He Wouldn’t Know To Search For Kirby describes his day: He sleeps eight and a half hours and wakes around 5:30 a.m., without an alarm. He spends about five minutes on email in the morning, then exercises. He rotates among four workouts. When travel makes him choose, sleep takes priority. He reads The Wall Street Journal cover to cover, about 15 minutes of the New York Times, about five magazines and two books a week. He likes science fiction, especially Isaac Asimov, and praises The Three-Body Problem. He also reads science, history and biographies. He tries to keep meetings to no more than four hours a day and says his average is lower. Meetings are short and conversational, that decks have to be sent to him beforehand not read aloud. He takes a 15-minute nap most days. For overnight flying, he never eats. He sleeps immediately. “Sleep. Going eastbound across the Atlantic, which I’ve probably done at least a hundred times, I never once have eaten a meal on the airplane going eastbound across the Atlantic, because as soon as the wheels are off the runway, I lie down and I go to sleep.” He’s willing to spend more on onboard food, but he doesn’t stay awake for it on an overnight flight himself. And reading the entire newspaper has a purpose beyond staying current: “Reading cover to cover, I find all kinds of interesting stuff that I would have never known. I wouldn’t have searched for it, so I would have never learned it, would have never known it. It is just so important.” This fits his earlier description of reading competitors’ earnings call transcripts for two decades. He wants enough information from different places to see connections someone focused only on their immediate task might miss. He doesn’t want the day consumed by yesterday’s operating metrics. He wants to spend his time on what’s coming and what the airline should do about it. The Spreadsheet Guy Now Says Spreadsheet Conclusions Are “Toxic” Kirby says: “People make a huge mistake thinking that the answer is in the spreadsheet, that the math can solve all the problems. I like spreadsheet analysis. Spreadsheet conclusions are toxic, because the answer is not in the spreadsheet. The way to look at a spreadsheet or a mathematical analysis is, frankly, it’s a tautology based on the assumptions.” …“The important thing to do when you’re looking at a spreadsheet analysis or any kind of analysis is understand what the assumptions are and question the assumptions. That’s where the value is created. If the assumptions are off by a little bit, how’s that going to change the answer?” A precise result is often just scientism. But I remember Kirby’s March 2012 explanation for not offering inflight wi-fi earlier at US Airways. He couldn’t never make the economics work selling internet access. He only approved it when there was data showing the airline losing ticket sales to competitors due to lack of wi-fi. He was also part of the management team that charged for water and tried to eliminate elite bonus miles. Early in his United tenure, the airline cut significant elements of Polaris service and domestic first class meals. Today United is spending on seatback entertainment and Starlink. I wrote last year about the change in how Kirby and his finance team discuss food spending: they don’t necessarily know the precise revenue produced by a better meal, but they’re willing to spend based on a view of the airline customers will prefer. Oscar Munoz Told Him To Praise Employees More Kirby says getting fired from American was the most shocking experience of his career. He’d been told he would become CEO on a particular date. Then someone stood in his doorway and told him they’d changed their mind and couldn’t work with him anymore. (Parker wasn’t ready to leave, and they could keep Robert Isom around moving him up to President while Kirby wasn’t likely to wait.) It forced him to think about what he should do differently. It also led him to work for Oscar Munoz, whom he describes as the only person in his career to sit him down and give him negative feedback. “I sit in one-on-one rooms with you all the time, and every single time you talk about the employees and how it makes them feel. But they think you’re just this math guy that only cares about the number, and you don’t say that to them enough. You need to say to people what you say to me.” Munoz told him that employees couldn’t see concern that was expressed only in private, and this changed how he communicated. I’ve covered that advice before. He also says he learned to stop treating a meeting as a waste of time once he’d worked out the answer. Now he tries to withhold his opinion, ask junior people first, and let others work through the decision. He says that produces better buy-in and better decisions. And he does say something positive about Doug Parker: describing the America West–US Airways and US Airways–American mergers, he says he couldn’t have done them without Doug, who was “a huge partner.” He follows that by saying the deals wouldn’t have happened without him, either. (In fact, Kirby is the one who put together the financing with Barclays for America West to acquire US Airways.) He Wants Big Upside Without A Bet That Can Kill The Airline Kirby’s gambling background is part of this. He counted cards and played high stakes poker. He talks often about being banned from most Las Vegas casinos and suggests executives play poker with their own money to learn to act before an outcome is certain, pairing it with “risk of ruin”: “If you’re a card counter, you bet aggressively when the odds are in your favor, but you bet in a way that, even if you go on a really long run of bad luck—which can happen—you don’t go broke.” In business, he says, that means thinking about an off-ramp before making the bet. He wants optionality – have a plan for an aircraft, but know where it goes if opportunities change. That makes him more confident moving forward with an investment. He describes the pandemic aircraft orders that way. He believed travel would recover. With competitors retiring aircraft, he thought United didn’t have to be completely right about demand to benefit from being ready with more capacity and suggests every other airline made a mistake retiring planes (American obviously did). I’ve made a similar point about United’s unusual destinations. A couple of weekly flights can give the airline attention and make its network more attractive without requiring a huge investment in that one market. The direct profit from those flights isn’t the only possible return. He applies the same thinking to eVTOL and supersonic aircraft. They put down ‘orders’ which are great PR for those companies and gives United options, and he calls them “free rolls” where United gets potential upside without putting a large amount of money at risk. He also says a board should fire a CEO whose long-term decisions turn out badly (duh, but not so obvious everywhere) and that executives shouldn’t blame Wall Street’s short-term focus for refusing to act – they should make the best decision and accept the career risk. He Hired An AI Tutor. United Is Also Using AI To Reduce Office Work. Kirby calls himself an AI evangelist, but he doesn’t want it summarizing away the detail he values: “I don’t want the summary. I want to read the footnotes and the appendix, because that’s where all the interesting facts are. And if you’re trying to set yourself apart, if you’re trying to figure out—which I often am trying to do—where everyone else is wrong, that’s where you create value.” A summary can deliver the main conclusion while leaving out the assumption or odd detail that would cause him to question it. Except that’s only what AI does when it’s what you ask it to do. You can ask the AI what’s interesting in the footnotes. You can ask what conditions would falsify a conclusion, or what assumptions are crucial. There’s something real to be said for getting messy in the details, but it’s not that AI is incapable of doing that work. Programming changed his view of the technology. He hired a tutor and took three one-hour lessons. He has a computer science background, but says he could build things in a couple of hours that would previously have taken hundreds. He sees AI as especially useful for getting a prototype working, with tech staff making it reliable enough to use in the business. And United’s use of AI is already about more than explaining delays to customers. Last October, chief financial officer Mike Leskinen linked process improvements and AI to a 4% year-over-year reduction in management headcount. He said another 4% reduction was planned for 2026, totaling about 8% over the two years. Leskinen has also discussed faster information retrieval for customer service, predictive maintenance and changes in finance. I’ve argued that annual reductions of this size are modest compared with the work that could eventually change in finance, customer contact, revenue accounting and planning. Kirby Calls Out The Rest Of The Industry OFor Slsahing Customer Experience Kirby makes a sweeping criticism of other airline executives: “And the industry is now populated with executives at a lot of airlines who’ve made their career on cost-cutting. And when all you’re doing is cost-cutting, it almost all comes at the expense of the customer. Because we can’t change airport fees, we can’t change fuel price. All those things are fixed. All you can do is take the cheese off the pizza and cut the customer expenses.” Kirby tried to charge for water at US Airways! US Airways didn’t have the revenue potential of United, American or Delta. And his boss Doug Parker was a protege of Bill Franke. And customers weren’t opening up their wallets for better experiences back then. It’s been a remarkable change for Kirby who’s become willing to recognize benefits before they show up in his model and to spend on Starlink earlier than most, on food and lounges (though United’s international business class meals still lag, but the wine is good). Giving Employees Fewer Reasons To Apologize Kirby says his job is to create an airline employees are proud of, so that they take better care of customers (who take better care of profits). And he breaks it into four elements of product, reliability, technology and service, with service the most important. The other three make it easier for employees to deliver the service. A working app, reliable wifi and a product that meets expectations reduce the number of conversations that begin with a disappointed passenger. “My goal is to create an airline that they’re proud of, but also to eliminate their need to apologize for anything.” Working wifi improves the flight directly. It also means a flight attendant spends less time dealing with something they can’t fix. Clear delay information helps the passenger and reduces the burden on the employee who would otherwise have to explain an uncertain situation. Kirby wants each disrupted flight explained in plain English, as honestly as an employee would explain it to him. Passengers should be able to understand what’s wrong, what the airline is doing about it, and what options they have. Near the end of the interview, he offers a more concrete way to judge whether United is getting this right. He wants the vacation to begin at the departure airport: “I said earlier, I want your vacation to start when you arrive at the departure airport instead of when you land at the arrival airport. I think we are going to take the stress out of travel.” “I think of travel as nose-to-tail, all customers, but I think of travel through the lens of a parent traveling with young children. I have seven, so I’ve been traveling with young kids for almost 30 years. I know what it’s like, and I get a lot of help.” …“I think of travel through the lens of traveling with young kids, and how do we make it easy to travel with young children? If we can do that, we’re going to make it great for everyone. The revolution is not going to be in the physical side of what the airplanes are like. The revolution is going to be in technology that makes it easy and stress-free.” Making travel work for that parent is a useful test. Can they get seats together without a fight? Does a delay message arrive early enough to do something useful? When they misconnect, can they find an alternative that keeps them together? At the same time, questioned how much of United’s apparent brand preference is actually customers following the schedule. Growing the network can improve results even without a change in affection for the airline. Kirby’s own argument for growing the network made this case eight years ago. Topics on this page