Sully Sullenberger: Making a Difference

Captain Sully Sullenberger joins Coach Pete and Peter Richon for the June 2012 Father’s Day edition of Financial Safari. They discuss Flight 1549, teamwork, and Making a Difference: Stories of Vision and Courage from America’s Leaders. Call 800-661-7383 or text PLAN to 600-700. Transcript Automatically transcribed from this episode; timestamps are approximate. 00:00 In this FinancialSafari.com interview from mid-June 2012, Peter Rashawn and Coach Pete interview former pilot and American hero, Sully Sullenberger. And welcome back into the Financial Safari, your weekly show aimed at educating you on all aspects of your money, your finance, and your financial decision-making. And Coach Pete, we have a very special guest on for this special Father's Day weekend edition of the Financial Safari. We have Sully Sullenberger, the captain that had the miracle in the Hudson, of course, that landing. And he's writing books, in fact, a multiply published author now, several books out. And we wanted to bring him on the show because he is really making a difference in people's lives. 00:49 And welcome in, Captain Sully. Great to be with you. Thank you. Coach Pete, we wanted to talk with him about that miracle in the Hudson and about the books that he's been writing. Yeah, that was Flight 1549. I'm sure Sully remembers that well. Yeah, January 15, 2009. That's one of those events that people remember where they were when they first heard about it. I was telling the producer of the show, we'll never see an event like that again. I don't think no one got hurt. Well, everybody survived, all 155 people. We were very grateful for that. A lot of people did their jobs exceptionally well that day. Now, you've become a pretty well-known author here. I wanted to talk about your, I mean, the book that I like, Making a Difference, Stories of Vision and Courage from America's Leaders. What inspired you to write that? And let's talk about some of the leaders you talk about in the book. Well, of course, leadership is incredibly important, especially now we're facing as a society so many large and complicated problems that it may take generations to solve. 01:41 And so these are things I've been thinking about my whole life. And of course, in the last three years, these mind-bending three years that we've had to travel the world and meet world leaders from all walks of life, I began to hear these incredible, sometimes funny but always inspiring stories that I just had to put on the page and I had to share. So what were some of the best ones that you found in the process of writing the book? Well, the very first one we profile is Admiral Thad Allen, the former Coast Guard Commandant, who was brought in in the darkest hours of the response to Hurricane Katrina to fix it. And just through the power of his personal leadership and courage, he was able to turn it around with incredible skill and quickness. And he did the same thing with the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf and with the 2010 response to the earthquake in Haiti. 02:30 Another one is Jack Bogle, the founder and retired CEO of the Vanguard Group, a mutual fund pioneer, an absolute maven in terms of the financial world. Another is Jim Senegal, the co-founder and recently retired CEO of Costco, who is someone who's done well while doing good. He's found a way in a very difficult business, retail, to reward his shareholders, to provide great value for his customers, and still make it a great place to work. Yeah, I fought Costco for a while, but I went in there a few months ago, and it really does have some great savings for the customers. And I was amazed. If you look at the name badges of the employees who worked at Costco, they have the year that they started, and it's often 20 or 25 years ago that gives you a great indication of if it weren't a great place to work, 03:16 they wouldn't have stayed that long. And interestingly, one of the bellwether measures that Jim Senegal used to see how he was doing at Costco was that the price of the Costco hot dog has been $1.50 since 1985. That's 27 years now. And I can't think of anything else that's been the same price for 27 years. Right. That's good savings. Well, at Costco, they seem to have a system. They seem to have systemized how they have a process to getting the product to the stores, getting the product in the consumer's hand, and getting that savings. And I think having a system is very important to many things in life, training a pet, educating a child, and really making a difference. And how much of the system, the training, the preparation, and the exit planning, Captain Sully accounted for all of your passengers to be able to survive that miracle on the Hudson. 04:05 Well, it certainly was all that and more. It was a culture in which we operated. Again, it takes great leadership to have an effective and collaborative and a safe and high-quality culture. And so these people that I profiled in there from all walks of life, a very diverse group, some particularly well-known but whose stories have not been completely told, and some not well-known at all, but all of whom viewed the world in the same way, as an opportunity for good. And as one of them says, Gene Kranz, the legendary NASA flight director who with his team helped bring Apollo 13 safely back from around the moon, he says leaders have to be able to check their ego at the door. They have to be able to do things for the right reason, you know, for the greater good of the group and not just for their own personal needs. 04:54 Absolutely. You know, your goal as a pilot was to get 100% of the time, get the people who got on the plane, let them get off the plane safely, correct? Absolutely. And that required great vigilance on every flight because, you know, out of a 42-year flying career, 20,000 hours on the air where we worked very hard to make it routine and never be surprised by anything, I never knew when or even if on one day I might face some ultimate challenge, but I had to be ready for whatever might happen and be able to solve the problem the first time, even if it was something like this that we'd never specifically trained for. And you had your flight planned to begin with, but you also had to have some contingencies in place if things didn't go as planned. Absolutely. That was one of the challenges of being an airline pilot when things go so well, 99.99% of the time, but being vigilant enough and avoiding complacency. 05:42 So if something bad did happen, you could just, you could handle it really well. So, you know, it absolutely required great commitment, great leadership to do that consistently on every flight, on every day for years. You know, I say that because there are some amazing parallels between being an aircraft pilot and also being a financial planner because things don't go as planned a lot of times in the financial world. Matter of fact, there are some Wall Street firms that say that people only have a 92% chance of not outliving their money when they retire. In other words, they have an 8% chance of not having money through retirement. And we often joke that if, like, if you were getting ready to take off and you came through the intercom and told folks that you had a 92% chance of landing safely, I think everyone would pull the slide and jump out before you could take off. Yeah, that wouldn't be good enough for me. 06:29 I mean, so what we've done in aviation is we went from, in the decade from 1967 to 1976, your chances of dying in a major jet airline accident in the U.S. were about 1 in 2 million today. They're about 1 in 20 million. So we've kept on getting it stronger and better and safer all along the way. And we kept innovating like we did on that flight that day. By the way, my favorite definition of innovation is to change before you're forced to, either by regulation, by competition, or by circumstance. And the more and greater you're able to change, the more of a competitive advantage it becomes and the more you're able to turn adversity into an opportunity. Well, I've talked with several motorcycle riders, Captain Sully, who said that there are really two types of riders, those that have crashed and those that will. Lucky that it's not that same way in the air because you are prepared, 07:19 and it's always better to be prepared than to be surprised. But regularly checking up on your progress and doing those maintenance inspections and seeing how you have been doing and making sure that you are staying ahead of that curve, that's vitally important, isn't it? Oh, absolutely. In fact, one of the takeaways of the book, and there are lots of leadership books written for or by CEOs or for salespeople, but my book is written for everyone, whether you have a big job or not, a fancy title or not. These are techniques that, from these very personal stories, these dozen people we interview, that everyone can learn, that each of us can learn to be more fulfilled at work, more effective at work, at school or at home. And even if you don't have a title, you can be a leader, and many people are. And so there are a lot of people right now in every walk of life who are doing these things, 08:05 who are being leaders. They not think of themselves that way, but by the way they act and the way they treat others, they are. We are talking again, friends, with Captain Sully, of course, the pilot for that miracle on the Hudson, where all of his passengers did survive his emergency crash landing into the Hudson River several years ago. He has also authored some great books, Making the Difference and Highest Duty. We've had a great time having him on the program. And another couple questions here from Coach Pete. Well, I know you went to the Air Force Academy to begin with, correct? I did, and then graduate school at Purdue and then University of Northern Colorado. Yeah, so, I mean, it takes a lot of skill to do what you've done. And retirement was just around the corner when this accident happened. And, I mean, what would Sully have been doing if this accident didn't happen? 08:51 Oh, I was going to keep on working for a long time. I mean, I'm a lifelong learner, and I had become an expert in these things over my whole career. I'd done more than just fly, I'd become an expert in managing risk and leading in difficult situations. In fact, that was one of the classes I helped develop at the airline and taught to many of our colleagues. So I was going to fly as long as I could, probably until at least age 65. Because, you know, in the airline industry, we've had a lot of difficult challenges, airline bankruptcies, loss of pensions, huge pay cuts. And so I was setting myself up for my next career even well before this. Well, Sully, a drill I like to do with everyone I talk to is ask them if they could get into a time machine and go 10 years into the future, where do they see themselves? I see myself doing more of what I'm doing now as a speaker, as an author, as a consultant to industry, 09:42 as a CBS News aviation and safety expert doing on-air commentary about important issues that people care about. I'd like to do more of that. I want to continue to make a difference. In fact, my personal goal is that even though we, my crew and I, and all the first responders, were able to save the lives of all 155 passengers and crew three years ago, that if I am diligent and work very hard, and if I'm particularly adept, and if I'm fortunate, it may be that my greatest contributions lie ahead. And whether it's in quality control and process control or safety for industry, or whether it's applying what we've learned in aviation to medicine and improving patient safety, which I'm working on with many others right now, I hope that we can continue to make important contributions and make a difference. I saw a great article on you almost right after it happened in People magazine. 10:30 I don't remember that article or not. I do. I remember it well. There was a cover photograph of us. That was February 2009, so just a month after our emergency landing in the Hudson. And the writer actually was in my high school. She went to my high school. She was one year under me, Nicole Wysensee. Oh, yes. I remember her well. That was a well-done piece. I had a crush on her in high school. That transitions nicely into my next set. It's on the Internet. She'll find out. Speaking of which, Captain Sully, you talk a lot about making the most out of relationships. What do people need to be doing and thinking about when they are forming and building relationships to really help make the most out of each relationship that they have here in life? I think that they need to do what many of us do and what I try to do every week when I would come to work as an airline captain. 11:21 What people don't understand or appreciate about what it's like to work for a large airline is that we fly with people all the time that we've never met before. And so at the beginning of a week of flying, one of the responsibilities of the captain after the introductions are made is to quickly take this collection of individuals and form an effective team to align goals, to set the proper tone, to open channels of communication, to create a shared sense of responsibility for the outcome among all of us. So if something bad or some challenge were to happen on the very first flight, that we can as effectively deal with it as we'd normally develop over weeks or days of working together. And so it's that kind of vision, a kind of personal connection, a kind of creating an environment in which we can all do our best work. 12:09 That's so important no matter what we do. And so, again, leadership is really the key. And then making a personal connection even with large numbers of people is what the best leaders are able to do. A group of strangers form a team as they all ride together in an aluminum canister in the sky. We're talking with Captain Chesley, Sullenberger, and Sully. Captain Sully, we certainly appreciate the time. Thank you so much for all you've done. And we appreciate the great information that you've shared with us in your books. Thank you. It's called Making a Difference, Stories of Vision and Courage from America's Leaders, available for Father's Day. All the best, Captain Sully. Thanks for being with you. Thank you so much for listening to this interview on the Financial Safari. Remember, folks, if you have any questions about this interview or your financial situation, 12:55 you can email the team from the Financial Safari at comments at financialsafari.com. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.