Turnaround Time: Uniting an Airline and Its Employees in the Friendly Skies

Wall Street Journal Bestseller

Go behind the scenes with the CEO who led United Airlines’ remarkable turnaround.

Around the world and around the clock, the people of United Airlines are locked in a struggle against time to ensure your aircraft lands and takes off for another flight safely and efficiently. This “turnaround time” is the heartbeat of an industry in which the margin for error is nil and success is measured by fractions of a second.

Turning around an aircraft and turning around an airline are very different challenges in most respects, except one: it takes a united team to perform it well.

In 2015, when Oscar Munoz took the helm of this iconic brand, its culture was anything but united and its reputation was in free fall. A merger with its onetime rival Continental had stalled, operational and financial performance was badly trailing those of its competitors, and the bonds of trust with shareholders, customers, and employees had reached a breaking point.

Setting out an ambitious plan to rejuvenate the company, Oscar learned that there was nothing wrong at United that couldn’t be fixed by championing what was right—the employees themselves.

Meanwhile, only a month into the job, Oscar suffered a near-fatal heart attack that set in motion a race against the clock to find a heart transplant to save his life, even as he fought to salvage his vision for United’s revival. The health emergency—a true test of personal crisis management—might have been the end of the story—until employees and union leaders rallied around Oscar, inspiring him to pull through, something he did within weeks following a successful procedure.

In this unforgettable CEO story, Oscar and the people he led, both with new leases on life, would go on to weather more turbulence, overcoming battles with investors and navigating several PR crises—including a global pandemic—to deliver top-tier operational performance, strong returns to shareholders, and ascending levels of customer satisfaction. By the end of his tenure, through a display of inspirational leadership, the people of United were finally flying together as one team, defying pessimism from industry insiders and rekindling optimism from employees and the customers they served.

With candor, humor, and heartfelt wisdom, Oscar reveals in this powerful business memoir how he rose from humble immigrant origins to lead United Airlines through one of modern business’s greatest corporate turnarounds. He offers soulful, much-needed leadership lessons for today’s world: listening with empathy, standing up for employees, a masterclass in building corporate culture that is durable and profitable because it’s principled, and advancing a vision for a genuinely inclusive economy for the future.

This is more than a business memoir—it's a playbook for leading through adversity with humanity and heart:

• Leadership in Crisis: Go inside the twin crucibles of a near-fatal heart attack and a historic corporate collapse, where the race for a heart transplant mirrored the fight to save an iconic American brand.
• A Corporate Turnaround Playbook: Discover the counterintuitive strategy that revived a failing culture by putting employees first and proving that principled leadership is profitable leadership.
• From Immigrant to CEO: Follow Oscar Munoz's incredible journey from his humble origins to the C-suite, a testament to resilience and the American dream.
• Lessons in Empathy: Learn the practical, soulful leadership lessons—from navigating PR disasters to the COVID-19 pandemic—that are essential for today's business world.

Oscar Munoz served as the CEO and chairman of United Airlines, previously holding several executive leadership positions at CSX, AT&T, US West, PepsiCo and Coca-Cola.  He serves on the board of directors of Salesforce, CBRE, TelevisaUnivision, and Archer Aviation; is a trustee of the University of Southern California ad the Brookings Institution; and is an independent trustee for Fidelity. He earned his bachelor’s degree the University of Southern California and an MBA from Pepperdine. To date, he remans the only person of Hispanic heritage to run a US airline.