Want the Best From Your People? Try This.
The principle of a modern CEO and a Persian king from 2,500 years ago that gets results
“Three things are important in human life. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.”
— Henry James, 1902
Ed Bastian, CEO of Delta, says that 20 years ago, 80 percent of travelers picked an airline based on price. Ask them today why they fly Delta, and 80 percent will tell you it’s because of the experience: the way they’re treated and the way the brand shows up for them. Price is now the afterthought.
It is a massive shift years in the making, beginning with the culture inside the company.
For you see, Delta didn’t begin by trying to delight customers. It set out to take care of the people who take care of customers — the gate agents, the flight attendants, the mechanics, the thousands of employees you may never see interacting with customers — and let the delight arrive as a byproduct.
Obsessed with Our People
In an interview with Fortune earlier this year,1 Bastian said:
“When you asked people why they chose an airline for their specific flight [20 years ago], 80% of the time it would be whoever had the lowest price. Today, if you ask people why they choose Delta, 80% would say [it’s] because it’s Delta, because of the experience, the brand; 20% is the other stuff. So just a total flip. And so that was the most important thing, getting paid for the great service that our people do.”
How does Delta get great service out of its people?
“You have to let your people know that you’re supporting them and putting them out front, rather than the management being out front. We’re not obsessing on customers, per se, at the leadership levels, because we want to obsess over our own people, so that they can obsess over you as a customer. When your people know that you’ve got their back, amazing things can happen. That had been lost, and bringing that back, and getting their confidence and trust back, was really key.”
Kindness Wins
“Not by violence, but by loving kindness.”
Twenty-four centuries before that interview, the historian Xenophon wrote of a king who understood the same formula. In the Cyropaedia2, his account of the education and reign of Cyrus the Great, the dying king tells his son that no throne survives on the strength of its scepter:
“Your kingdom is not guarded by this golden scepter, but by faithful friends;
their loyalty is your true staff.”
— Cyrus the Great, c. 370 BC
Cyrus built an empire that swallowed Babylon not by terrifying his soldiers into obedience but, according to Xenophon, by feeding them before he asked anything of them, learning their names, and winning them “not by violence, but by loving kindness.”
Love ‘Em Up
This is the same principle Alan Mulally distilled into five words at Ford — the first axiom of the Working Together™ Leadership & Management System I now teach to companies and speak to groups about: people first — love ‘em up.
This isn’t some would-be inspirational poster hanging in the hallway of corporate headquarters. It is love by design: a decision made to treat everyone with dignity, kindness, and respect — and to have high expectations for them, driven by transparency, accountability, a shared truth through the data, a can-do, find-a-way attitude, and relentless implementation.
Trust doesn’t arrive because a leader says the right things about culture. It shows up when who you are matches what you do (your “Be” and your “Do”), and it works when done consistently and repeatedly, over time. As it quietly accumulates, you feel that were seen, that you were heard, that you will not be discarded when you’re struggling.
Cyrus’s soldiers had that evidence on the battlefield. Delta’s employees have it at the gate and in the air.
Now imagine an organization that got the order backward — that obsessed over the customer first and hoped the employees would simply absorb whatever was left over.
You don’t have to imagine it; this is exactly how most companies operate.
There’s so much to learn,
“Delta: Bankrupt to Billions,” Titans and Disruptors (Fortune), March 31, 2026
Cyropaedia, Xenophon (Project Gutenberg)