Good morning. As Delta Air Lines celebrates its 100th anniversary, CEO Ed Bastian reflects on the leadership lessons he has learned during his tenure.
In a fireside chat with Barbara Humpton, CEO of Siemens USA, at the Economic Club of Washington D.C.’s event on Wednesday, Bastian said he was 25 years old “before I stepped foot on an airplane.” He traveled from LaGuardia Airport in New York to Chicago for business. Bastian often mentions this experience in commencement speeches to encourage graduates that their futures are unlimited. As a college student, he had never flown on an airplane, so he never imagined he would one day lead a global airline.
Humpton highlighted Bastian’s longstanding rise at Delta by taking a look back: “It’s 1998, the millennium is approaching,” she began. “We’ve got Google, this new company that’s just started. Celine Dion is topping the Billboard charts that year, and Ed Bastian joins Delta as VP of finance.”
Bastian served as CFO for several years before becoming president and then CEO in 2016. In these roles, he has helped guide Delta through 9/11, bankruptcy, the COVID pandemic, and now a century of business.
Leadership advice
Reflecting on leading the Fortune 500 company for almost 10 years, Bastian shared some key lessons:
What has changed the most is the need to manage many constituencies—shareholders, customers, government, community partners, and, most importantly, employees, he explained. Everything seems to move at hyper speed, and that’s changed dramatically over the last 10 years, he said.
There’s no manual for it; you have to be in the game, learning as you go, Bastian said. “Stakeholder management is one of the most important things CEOs do.”
At Delta, he’s responsible for 100,000 employees. “I’m proud of how the company got through COVID; we didn’t have a playbook for the pandemic,” Bastian said. He emphasized that during such moments, you must ensure you’re taking everyone with you and keep people moving forward.
One way to do that is to portray a positive vision for the future—people want to follow leaders who can guide them somewhere meaningful, he said. As CEO, you must think about what 20, 30, or even 100 years from now will look like, Bastian said. “You can’t delegate that to a planning department,” he said. “You can’t delegate that to a board.” An effective CEO must believe in and embody that vision every day, he added.
A recent Fortune cover story by my colleague Shawn Tully explores how Bastian’s leadership has boosted Delta’s bottom line and reinforced stakeholder alignment.
Tully wrote that Delta has become the largest U.S. air carrier by revenue, in part due to the customer loyalty Bastian’s leadership has inspired—loyalty that helps the airline withstand crises, like the recent non-fatal crash in Toronto.
Bastian helped build strong employee-management relations in an industry where such ties are often strained, turning Delta into America’s most profitable airline and sharing billions with employees along the way, according to Tully.
Leadership isn’t easy, but it’s most rewarding when driven by purpose.
Have a good weekend.
Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com
Leaderboard
Fortune 500 Power Moves
McGill will serve in an advisory capacity through Oct. 31. The company has also initiated a search process to find a permanent successor.
"I am proud of all we have accomplished together and believe that, after such long service with one company, this is the right time for me to embark on my next chapter," McGill said in a statement. She began the CFO role in August 2023, making her the first woman to become finance chief at the company. There will be different times in your career where you’re given "opportunities—or you could call them risks, however you want to see it"—and you should take them because they will help you grow, McGill told CFO Daily in 2023.
Ranjith Roy has been promoted to CFO of Yum! Brands (No. 491), the parent company of household-name brands including KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut. Roy is taking over from Chris Turner, promoted to CEO, effective Oct. 1. Roy joined Yum! in 2024 as chief strategy officer and treasurer, overseeing strategy, mergers and acquisitions and treasury operations. Before joining Yum!, he served as CFO of the e-commerce marketplace Goldbelly, where he helped scale operations. He also spent more than 15 years with Goldman Sachs, where he led investment banking relationships for restaurant, food and food tech businesses, building industry expertise.
Roy brings to the CFO role a “blend of commercial acumen, strategic insight on Yum!, and the restaurant industry,” Turner said in a statement. “He has a proven ability to navigate fast-paced and complex environments with a sharp focus on long-term value creation.”
Big Deal
"AI Revolution: CFOs Forecast a Transformation in Finance Teams" is a report by leadership advisory firm Egon Zehnder. The majority of CFOs (72%) surveyed say AI is important to their strategy. Most finance chiefs say they are in the early stages of using AI, either exploring concepts (40%) or beginning to implement it (48%). However, fewer than 10% of finance leaders surveyed have fully integrated or scaled AI accounting and finance use cases across their functions and organizations. Still, wherever they are on the AI journey, CFOs are already seeing meaningful benefits and expecting more ahead, according to the report.
Going deeper
"Ramp is taking aim at American Express by upending corporate credit cards. Can the $22.5 billion startup live up to the hype?" by Leo Schwartz
"Expert biochemist says a daily exercise that takes less than an hour is the ‘gold standard’ for reversing your age by decades" by Dave Smith
Overheard
"The key to a vision for better student lending is simple: people should borrow only what they can reasonably afford to repay."
—Brian Walsh, who leads financial planning, robo investing, ETFs, and financial education at SoFi, writes in a Fortune opinion piece titled, "My wife sold her engagement ring to pay our tax bill. It led to my PhD and my career tackling the student-debt crisis."
