JetBlue Airways: Valentine's Day 2007 (A)

Robert S. Huckman; Gary P. Pisano; Virginia  Fuller

Case | HBS Case Collection | August 2007 (Revised June 2010)

JetBlue Airways: Valentine's Day 2007 (A)

by Robert S. Huckman, Gary P. Pisano and Virginia Fuller

Abstract

Describes an operational crisis for JetBlue Airways during an ice storm in the eastern United States in February 2007 and chronicles the airline's immediate response. Provides detail concerning the history of the airline from its founding in 1999 through the February 2007 crisis, which forced the airline to cancel more than 1,000 flights over the course of six days. In addition, discusses the initial response to the crisis by CEO David Neeleman and his management team. Students are provided with the opportunity to evaluate this response in terms of its impact on customer relations, growth prospects, and ongoing operations for JetBlue.

Keywords: Customer Relationship Management; Crisis Management; Growth Management; Management Teams; Service Delivery; Air Transportation Industry; Eastern United States;

Format: Print

21 pages

Educators Purchase

Citation:

Huckman, Robert S., Gary P. Pisano, and Virginia Fuller. "JetBlue Airways: Valentine's Day 2007 (A)." Harvard Business School Case 608-001, August 2007. (Revised June 2010.)

Working Paper | 2019

Long-Term Firm Growth: An Empirical Analysis of US Manufacturers 1959-2015

Giovanni Dosi, Marco Grazzi, Daniele Moschella, Gary P. Pisano and Federico Tamagni

Firm growth is an essential feature of market economies, shaping together macroeconomic performance and the evolution of industry structures. As a po-tential indicator of organizational “ﬁtness” within a competitive environment, ﬁrm growth is also a central concern to both the practice and theory of business strategy. Despite both its theoretical and practical importance, though, growth remains a poorly understood property of ﬁrms. While previous studies have documented the highly skewed nature of ﬁrm growth rates, we know far less about the persistence of growth rates over long-periods of time. For instance, do “fast growers” tend to maintain their relative growth rates advantages over long-periods or is superior growth a transitory phenomenon? Is, as predicted by evolutionary and capability based theories of the ﬁrm, the process of ﬁrm growth path-dependent or is it more akin to a random walk? The answers to these questions are central to building a robust theory of ﬁrm growth. This paper attempts to address this gap in our empirical knowledge of ﬁrm growth using a dataset that spans 50 years, which al-lows the abandonment of the assumption, common to all incumbent studies, that the stochastic paths of all ﬁrms stem from the same generating process. These exploratory results indicate that growth rate persistence is there and my be even substantial for some ﬁrms, but it is rare. We also study the links between the micro-properties of ﬁrm growth within sectors and the patterns of aggregate growth of these same sectors. Indeed, we ﬁnd circumstantial but widespread evidence that heterogeneity across ﬁrms correlates with industry dynamism.

Citation:

Dosi, Giovanni, Marco Grazzi, Daniele Moschella, Gary P. Pisano, and Federico Tamagni. "Long-Term Firm Growth: An Empirical Analysis of US Manufacturers 1959-2015." Working Paper, May 2019. View Details

Cite View Details Read Now

Faculty & Research

JetBlue Airways: Valentine's Day 2007 (A)

Abstract

Citation:

About the Authors

More from these Authors