Business leaders look everywhere for inspiration, from eyeing their peers’ successes to tapping industry vets for insight. But Delta’s CEO, Ed Bastian, chose to form a close relationship with seven-time Super Bowl champion Tom Brady to shape the airline giant’s leadership—and Brady’s wisdom is revamping the company’s playbook.
“He’s a great leader,” Bastian recently told Fortune’s Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell on the Fortune 500: Titans and Disruptors of Industry podcast. “He’s got a great mind. He’s [got] a way of continuing to push the envelope.”
The leader of the $42.2 billion business doesn’t want his operating philosophy to exist in an echo chamber. Bastian explained that after a number of years at the top, companies don’t appreciate how hard it is to maintain their success. Many may fall into the trap of repeating the same formula over and over again in hopes of sustaining that momentum—but the Delta CEO says that’s the wrong approach. What really fuels success is constantly evolving.
“What got you to the top is continuing to reinvent, continuing to think differently, to be bold, push against all the strategies that made you great in order to sustain even greater performance,” Bastian continued. “And I don’t know anyone, at least in the sports world, for a longer time on a global stage that did that better than Tom did.”
The football star is bringing his own leadership flair to the company’s more than 100,000 employees with his “Tom Brady playbook.” Young staffers pose questions on how to succeed, move forward, and grapple with challenges; he’s also part of a video series that Delta workers complete as part of the company’s learning and development experience.
Staffers hear directly from Brady on his own personal career lessons—and Bastian says he leans on the quarterback legend “for an awful lot” in the transformation.
“Rather than just hearing from me all the time, having different voices come into our room and our leadership meetings and our 100,000 people, to share what greatness means—not to get there, but to sustain it—Tom is a great advocate for it,” the CEO said.
Brady’s post-football retirement in the corporate world
Brady first partnered with Delta Airlines in 2023, when the champion athlete, whose mother was, fittingly, a flight attendant, signed on as a strategic advisor to the Fortune 500 company. Bastian said his team needed continued inspiration to keep climbing up the industry ranks, and the five-time Super Bowl MVP was a perfect fit.
“He’s going to be talking to our people about greatness, about resilience, about excellence, about performance,” Bastian told CNBC in 2023, right after announcing their partnership. “He played with the greatest teams in the world. I think we run the greatest team in the airline space in the world, and putting our two brands together, magic is going to happen.”
Earlier that year, Brady had retired from an iconic 23-season stint in the NFL; however, he wasn’t ready to throw in the towel on his career just yet. Since 2023, he’s staked a claim in the business world as well; he’s become a part-owner of companies like NoBull and CardVault, while also speaking at major businesses, including Cisco and Cloudera. At Delta, he says he’s helping inspire people and grow a great team of workers.
“In this next chapter of my life, to continue to do things like that really stimulates my own personal growth in a lot of ways,” Brady told CNBC alongside Bastian in 2023. “I’m excited to share a lot of the lessons I’ve learned.”
The football icon says that successful teamwork “always starts at the top”; leaders should inspire others to maximize their opportunities and potential. And even though he spent decades performing at the top of the game, Brady says he’s not immune to criticism. In fact, he encourages it; Brady says resting on his reputation would be “the worst thing to do.” Throughout his football career, and in his current partnership as a strategic advisor, he still values being coached to sustain his ongoing success.
“I’m always one of the teammates,” Brady told Bastian in a 2024 Delta Gaining Altitude podcast episode. “Some of these guys were brand-new, but I wanted them to treat me like it was my first day on the job, too.”
Even during the early days of his football career, success didn’t come immediately, and Brady learned a lot from failure. He got his start as a benched, second-string quarterback on his California high school team, which didn’t win a single game. Even though he played at University of Michigan as a starting quarterback, he was a sixth-round pick in the 2000 NFL draft, selected 199th overall. Still, he persisted and became one of the greatest athletes of all time. Staying resilient in the face of failure is key to success in any profession, from sports to business.
“The reality of your business and career is overcoming adversity,” Brady told Shontell at the Fortune Global Forum in 2024. “The only way to do that is to fail, and the only way to fail is to put yourself in uncomfortable positions.”
“If you fail, and then you figure out a solution for the people you work with to overcome the failure, you gain a lot of self-confidence, and if you gain self-confidence, you’ll get a better chance for the next opportunity to succeed.”
