“Here,”
says Michael O’Leary, shoving something the size of a small grapefruit
wrapped in red and white cardboard over the table in his office at
Dublin airport. “Lunch.”
There is an awkward silence.
You do not expect a banquet from a budget airline boss who has threatened to make his passengers pay to use the toilet.
And
you do not want to upset a man who calls regulators “rapists”, rivals
“arseholes”, and advises customers wanting a refund to “f*** off”.
But what exactly has he given me here? Eventually, I make out the words on the wrapper and blurt: “Oh! A bagel!”
“It’s got pesto,” says O’Leary. “It was either that or McDonald’s. I figured you for a bagel girl.”
For
himself, he has procured a grim-looking chicken salad, entombed in
thick plastic, also from somewhere in the airport down the road. An
aide arrives with two takeaway coffees. So begins lunch with one of the
world’s best-known, least-loved and more improbable airline chief
executives.
I
had tried to persuade O’Leary’s press officer that lunch in the office
would be dull. Surely there was a restaurant he liked in Dublin? No.
Lunch with the chief executive of Ryanair would be a Ryanair lunch: at
the desk, just your basics, all expenses spared.
In the world
of aviation, Ryanair is a phenomenon, a no-frills behemoth that has
grown from a tiny operation which, in 1985, used to fly 5,000
passengers a year between Ireland and London in a single plane so small
that, according to the company, its cabin crew had to be no taller than
5ft 2in. Since he took over in 1994 O’Leary has relentlessly expanded,
with 200 aircraft flying more than 60m passengers a year to 150
European destinations, from the Canary Islands to Constanta in eastern
Romania.
Recession has sent bigger, older airlines around the
world hurtling into the red. Yet Ryanair has fared much better,
coupling average fares of just €32 with a ruthless drive to cut costs
and push up revenues by charging for everything from checking in online
to buying a cup of coffee on board.
In the middle of this year
Ryanair had the highest market value of any airline in the world, after
Singapore Airlines. On the day we meet, it is getting ready to announce
another quarterly profit and expects to make at least €200m this year.
None
of this is evident from Ryanair’s Dublin airport headquarters. Plastic
sacks of wastepaper are piled at the entrance. Boxes are stacked up in
corridors inside. The paintwork is scruffy, the carpet tired.
The
open-plan office feels barely as wide as one of Ryanair’s Boeing jets,
and nearly as cramped. There is a single aisle dividing tightly packed
teams of surprisingly young-looking workers into departments such as
marketing, sales and planning.
It looks less like one of the airline industry’s financial success stories and more like a scene from the television comedy The Office. Except the workers in The Office have bigger desks. And down at the end, peering out from behind the glass walls of his own modest office, is O’Leary.
Wearing
jeans, open-necked checked shirt and sneakers, he looks a bit tired and
pale up close. This could be because he and his wife Anita Farrell, a
former banker, have three children under the age of eight. Or because
he seems in a permanent state of exasperation with an endless number of
irritants, including his own staff.
As I try to prise off the
worryingly sturdy wrapper on the bagel, he says there are two “great
things” about lunchtime in an out-of-the-way office like Ryanair’s.
“One, there’s nowhere to go and eat,” and two, the only time staff are
allowed to use the internet for personal reasons is between five past
one and five to two. “So they all tend to stay at their desks at lunch
hour!”
The staff get another pasting as he moves on to talk
about management consultants (“should all be euthanised”) and MBAs
(“bullshit”). “MBA students come out with, ‘The customer’s always
right,’” he says, adopting a whiny voice. “Horseshit! The customer’s
usually wrong! And, ‘My staff is my most important asset.’ Bullshit!
Staff is usually your biggest cost!”
It is hard to say how
serious he is about this. Ryanair did once say it had issued a memo
banning employees from charging their mobile phones at work to save on
electricity bills. But this always sounded like another PR prank by
O’Leary, whose flair for using the media is boundless.
Airline
entrepreneurs have often revealed a talent for doing their own PR.
Richard Branson flew in a hot air balloon for Virgin Atlantic. Stelios
Haji-Ioannou wore orange jumpsuits for EasyJet. But O’Leary takes the
practice to new heights.
It is not just his willingness to
dress up as the Pope to publicise a new route to Rome. Or his (so far
unrealised) threat to charge passengers to use the lavatory. It is the
sheer savagery of his blasts that make him stand out on the featureless
plains of modern corporate life.
For 20 bracing minutes, he
runs through a list of his more egregious enemies. There are the
“cretins” and “twerps” in the Civil Aviation Authority, the British
body that regulates the “bloody evil empire” of BAA, the airport
operator whose London monopoly was recently broken up, after prodding
from O’Leary, who had griped incessantly about its charges.
There
is the “big bloody supertanker” of Boeing, the US aircraft maker that
O’Leary has been badgering for months to sell him 200 new jets at
recessionary prices. And there is, visible right outside his office
window, one of his most hated foes: Aer Lingus, the struggling Irish
flag carrier for which O’Leary has made two thwarted bids in the past
three years. “There it is,” he hoots, jumping up out of his chair to
point out a large squat building facing away from his own. “The gulag!”
He would clearly like to make a third offer for Aer Lingus, but
knows this would mean trouble with its “bunch of bearded,
sandal-wearing union bosses”, not to mention Ireland’s “utterly
useless” politicians.
And then there is that other source of
endless aggravation, Ryanair’s passengers. Especially the ones wrecking
his efforts to shave luggage-handling costs by checking in their cases
(for an extra £30) because they are “too mentally bloody lazy to travel
with carry-on bags”.
Surely he doesn’t seriously expect anyone to go on a three-week holiday with just a carry-on?
“Oh, for God’s sake, of course you can for three weeks,” he says.
“I can’t.”
“You can.”
“I don’t want to.”
He stares at me, then admits his wife feels the same way.
“My
wife goes away on holidays for a couple of weeks, and she wears bikinis
and a few flips-flops, but she needs her 40 pairs of shoes,” he says
theatrically. “What do you need 40 pairs of shoes for?”
So, who
exactly is the ideal Ryanair passenger? “Our ideal passenger is someone
with a pulse and a credit card, who will follow the simple instructions
to lower our costs to the maximum.”
By this point, hunger is
driving me to make a fresh attempt on the bagel wrapper. Off it comes,
and there sits a sad-looking bagel containing a pile of pesto, tomato
and cucumber. I start picking at it. O’Leary’s salad sits menacingly on
his desk, untouched.
This is a typical lunch for him, he says, when he isn’t at the gym.
What does he like to do in the gym?
“Look up and down a slim girl’s rear,” he says. “Sadly there’s not that many of them. They’re a bunch of old sweaty farts.”
Though
greying a little, O’Leary is, at 48, not that old. Before he became a
loud-mouthed chief executive, he was a tax accountant, before that a
businessman’s son, expensively educated at some of Ireland’s best
schools. According to one newspaper’s estimate he is worth more than
£300m, partly thanks to a 4 per cent stake in Ryanair. But for years
now, he has been saying he will retire “in two or three years”. So what
is it today?
“Three years,” he says, suddenly trying to look
serious. By then it will be time to “Tesco-ise Ryanair”, by which he
means time to ditch him for someone more suitable for a larger, more
sedate operation.
“In certain respects I am our best salesman,”
he says, explaining the “pantomime villain character” he plays for the
airline is done purely for the free publicity (the net spend on
advertising last year was €5m, he says, not much for an airline
Ryanair’s size). “But I’m also negative in that a lot of my antics
detract from the fact that Ryanair has the youngest fleet of aircraft,
the best punctuality record, delivers a terrific customer service.
“I
think you need me for the rapid growth and for the in-cost reduction
initiatives, but once they’re all done you then need to hand over to
somebody who’s a bit more respectful of politicians and bureaucrats,
talks about caring about the environment and old people and f***ing
jungles and fish in the sea and all that shite.”
Goodness knows
what O’Leary will do if he ever retires. He claims to have no interest
in holidays. “I go to the Algarve with the family for two weeks,
because I have to. And I can build the sandcastles with the children.
You know, the sandcastle’s fine for the first five minutes, and after
that it’s, ‘Oh Jesus, will someone come and rescue me!’ I’m praying for
a crisis.”
What about close friends? “My wife, occasionally. My children on a good day.”
He
hates the theatre. Only sees films when dragged by his wife, “just for
marriage maintenance reasons”. His main interests, apart from Ryanair,
consist of farming, football and racehorses, of which he has a few
including one called War of Attrition, which won the Cheltenham Gold
Cup in 2006. I had always assumed this was an O’Leary-esque joke at a
rival’s expense – Aer Lingus, perhaps – but he says the animal had the
name when he bought it.
FIVE FURIOUS BOSSES
‘If you want a friend, get a dog’
Samuel Goldwyn (1879-1974)
A
bullying, vainglorious style, enormous ego and buckets of charm –
Goldwyn had what it took to get films made in Hollywood in its golden
age. A Polish Jewish émigré, he once said, “I don’t want to be
surrounded by ‘yes men.’ I want people who’ll disagree with me, even if
it costs them their jobs”.
Robert Maxwell (1923-1991)
The
Czech-born newspaper proprietor terrified employees and family with his
forceful style. He had courage and nerve but this tipped over,
ultimately, into illegal excess. In a letter to his wife, Maxwell
described how during the second world war he had dealt with a German
mayor whom he felt had betrayed him: “As soon as we marched off a
German tank opened fire on us. Luckily, he missed, so I shot the mayor
and withdrew.”
Donald Rumsfeld (born 1932)
Rumsfeld,
US secretary of defence from 2001-2006, was famously decisive. In the
1990s, while still a corporate executive, he attended a seminar run by
James O’Toole, professor of ethics at the University of Denver. In
Transparency (2008), O’Toole recalls questioning the factual
basis of a Rumsfeld assertion. “He came after me with bone-chilling
intensity,” he writes, “‘No one questions me! Do you understand that? I
am never wrong.’”
Al Dunlap (born 1937)
At
Scott Paper in the early 1990s Dunlap sacked thousands of people and
sold the business on for a profit. Dubbed “Chainsaw”, he relished his
ruthless image. “If you want a friend, get a dog,” he once said,
adding: “I’ve got two.” He was fired from the Sunbeam Corporation and
later investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission and agreed
to pay a settlement.
C Montgomery Burns (born c1909)
The fiendish boss of the Springfield nuclear power plant in the cult cartoon series The Simpsons.
Burns’ philosophy of management is, “I’ll keep it short and sweet.
Family, religion, friendship: these are the three demons you must slay
if you wish to succeed in business.” According to The Simpsons website, he is “more misunderstood than evil”.
Stefan Stern is the FT’s management columnist
There
is a strange lack of sophistication about O’Leary. His success has made
him one of the industry’s most prominent airline chiefs, his name
constantly on the lips of his peers, his business model aped around the
world. Willie Walsh, a fellow Irishman and the chief executive of
British Airways, once told me, only half-joking, that O’Leary’s success
had even driven other airline executives to copy his dress sense: “You
get these CEOs who, because O’Leary doesn’t wear a tie or a suit, feel
that to have any sort of respect, you can’t wear a tie.”
Yet
his world view has curious gaps. At one point, I ask him what he thinks
of other well-known figures in his industry. Stelios? “A rich kid who
got off his arse.” Richard Branson? “A genius in the way he has made a
fortune out of the Virgin brand, but he doesn’t add up to much.” But,
when asked about Tony Tyler, chief executive at Cathay Pacific, one of
Asia’s biggest airlines, he looks blank. “Never heard of him,” he says.
“Anyone in the airline industry outside of Europe, I wouldn’t know who
the hell they are.”
There is also something rather quaint about
him. He doesn’t have a BlackBerry, there is no computer on his desk. He
even claims not to have an e-mail address. “E-mail is rubbish. If
there’s something important, I’ll send a fax, or we’ll speak.”
Each
day a team compiles two reports on paper for him, one for sales, one
for punctuality, which give an instant overview of how the business is
performing. He gets up and grabs a sheet showing the day’s bookings,
the month’s sales, next month’s sales, available seats, how it all
compares with the same month last year, and so on. “Business should be
simple,” he beams.
Lack of e-mail does not stop him being an
enthusiastic correspondent. When UK advertising standards authorities
chided him for claiming Ryanair’s flights were faster than the Eurostar
train, he sent them a copy of
Everyday Maths for Dummies. Journalists who write about him
sometimes get an unsolicited, though frequently charming, missive. A
colleague on the FT who wrote a column comparing Ryanair to Aeroflot
received a two-page letter along with the latest “Girls of Ryanair”
calendar, featuring bikini-clad photos of Miss Check-In and Miss Fuel
Pump, a regular production that O’Leary insists uses only company cabin
crew.
The admiration is reciprocated, at least in the financial
media. On a cabinet in a corner of his office is a dusty collection of
awards sent by the likes of Barron’s, the financial magazine that has
named him one of the “world’s most respected CEOs” ever since it
started handing out the award in 2005. “Barf!” says O’Leary, looking
embarrassed, when asked about the prizes.
His constant
obsession with cost-cutting, however, not to mention his foul mouth,
has also spawned less adulatory attention, such as the website www.ihateryanair.co.uk, dedicated to what it calls “the world’s most hated airline”.
Before
today, I say, every person I spoke to and said I was having lunch with
Michael O’Leary reacted with horror or pity. Doesn’t he find it
wearying to be such a hate figure? “It would be wearying if you weren’t
growing by 9m passengers a year,” he says. “We know, fundamentally,
that we have huge public support.”
Outside, the light is
fading. My flight home is getting near. My bagel is still there, still
half-eaten. O’Leary’s salad still sits on his desk.
A few days
later, I get a letter from O’Leary, thanking me for taking the time to
come to Dublin to see him and hoping I enjoyed my “five-star gourmet
lunch”. By the way, he adds: “I forgot to charge you for the coffee, so
you owe me one.”
Pilita Clark is the FT’s aerospace correspondent
...........................
Ryanair HQ
Dublin airport
Takeaway coffee x 2 €3.60
Chicken salad x 1 €5.50
Pesto, tomato, cucumber bagel x 1 €5.50
Total €14.60
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